Deutsche Bӧrse tackles VMware application migration with Google Cloud

Frankfurt-based financial exchange firm Deutsche Bӧrse has revealed further details of how its efforts to migrate its sizeable VMware-based, on-premise application estate to the Google Cloud platform is progressing.

The company is responsible for providing a marketplace for trading shares and securities, while giving enterprises and investors access to global capital markets.

Deutsche Bӧrse initially went public with the news of its cloud technology tie-up with Google in September 2019, having already spent the previous three or more years preparing to move its IT infrastructure off-premise.

According to the company, efforts in this area markedly ramped up during the 12 months to September 2019, as its CIO, Christoph Böhm, sought to pursue a cloud-first strategy incorporating multiple suppliers.

These included Google Cloud, which Deutsche Bӧrse is leaning on to assist with the modernisation of its enterprise applications and workloads, in keeping with the company’s tech-led Roadmap 2020 growth strategy.

Deutsche Bӧrse is pursuing a three-pronged growth strategy, with a focus on growing its business organically in existing markets; through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in new sectors; and investing in new technologies to stay ahead of the competition.

The company has previously stated that its move to the cloud will play a foundational role in underpinning its investments in technologies such as blockchain, robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics.

“The company sees cloud as an important enabler, supporting its strategic focus on new technologies and helping to keep it on the forefront of technology while maintaining its own highly secure, resilient, trusted infrastructure,” said Google in a blog post outlining the details of Deutsche Bӧrse deepening its technological ties with the cloud giant.

As part of the next phase of the company’s cloud journey, Deutsche Bӧrse recently deployed the Google Cloud VMware Engine to aid the extension and migration of its VMware-based on-premise workloads to the Google public cloud.

This is in keeping with the firm’s plans to operate a hybrid cloud-like IT infrastructure, while at the same time pursuing a multicloud strategy and ensuring that its VMware applications remain accessible and usable by its employees, without requiring any rewriting.

“Deutsche Bӧrse has a long list of on-prem VMware applications across its portfolio that have been customised over the years for the company’s unique processes,” the Google blog post continued. “Many of these applications, especially in the business’s post-trading side, could benefit from the cloud. 

“The ability to run and manage workloads consistent with its on-prem environments reduces the team’s operational burden and enables staff to continue using existing skills, tools, policies and processes that comply with the company’s stringent regulatory requirements.”

While the VMware application migration part of the project is still very much a work in progress, Deutsche Bӧrse’s development team is already reporting benefits, including faster test and development throughput.

“Prior to this, the team had limited testing capabilities, but can now conduct thousands of tests across three or four environments in the same amount of time, allowing for earlier identification of errors in the development process,” the blog post continued.

“By moving VMware workloads to Google Cloud, Deutsche Börse can set up a new private cloud instance in minutes, while maintaining existing policies and tools, including existing cloud constructs such as networking interconnects – all while increasing business agility.”

Looking ahead to the next phase of its cloud migration journey, the company has set its sights on ramping up the automation of its internal processes further, and making greater use of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools within its operations.

“Hyperscaling machine-learning services will enable Deutsche Börse to train data science models in a couple of hours rather than weeks – a huge improvement in supporting its ambitions to further automate internal processes and provide new data-driven services to customers faster than before in a secure way,” the blog post added.