London Stock Exchange CTO Leaves During Move To Linux

19 Jul 2010

The London Stock Exchange, which is currently in the process of moving its trading platforms to Linux, has lost its chief technology officer, Robin Paine.

Anyone trying to contact Paine via email receives the following message, "Robin Paine no longer works for the London Stock Exchange".

It is unclear whether Paine's departure is connected to the change of operating system - Paine was notably instrumental in bringing a major Microsoft-based platform to the LSE. That platform, called TradElect, experienced a number of serious glitches.

In a 2007 interview, Paine said: "We looked at their (Microsoft's) whole suite of technology from their development environment through to their databases and operating systems, and we decided that their technology was best aligned to achieving this range of design principles"

The TradElect platform was abandoned after the series of outages, one of which lasted all day and led to traders storming out of the building in protest. The LSE is moving to a Linux and Sun Solaris-based Unix platform, which uses an Oracle database.

Last July, the London Stock Exchange indicated that it was moving to the new platform and bought the IT services and software company, MillenniumIT, to help it achieve its aim. Earlier this month, the LSE announced that the rollout of the new system had been delayed by two months for further testing.

At the time of writing, neither Paine nor the LSE had commented on his departure, or whether it is connected to the rollout to Linux.

during his career, Paine has also been an account executive at EDS (now HP), head of infrastructure at bank ABN Amro, deputy head of IT services at UBS and infrastructure manager at Morgan Stanley.

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