NEW YORK-By the end of the year, operators of alternative trading system (ATS) Bids Trading expect to relocate their systems to their own datacenter facility within the Equinix NY-4 datacenter located in Jersey City, N.J., according to Bids officials.
Currently, Bids' technology infrastructure is being hosted by Nasdaq OMX in a Secaucus, N.J., facility.
Data centres in Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today.
Macquarie Telecom, Equinix, ac3, manageNET and AAPT outlined a number of preventative measures taken in their respective data centres to prevent dust ingress.
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Equinix Australia managing director Darren Mann said there had been no customer visits to the data centre as a result of the storm.
Mann said the facility had changed the sticking mats at entrances more frequently to catch any dust off pedestrian traffic moving in and out of the suites.
“We also limited the opening times of delivery shutters,” Mann said.
Air conditioning vendors were also on-site to conduct visual checks of the air filters, he said.
Barchart.com, Inc., a leading provider of market data and information, today announced it has completed expansion into two new data center facilities, providing Barchart customers with additional connectivity and hosting options. The first is expansion into the Equinix data center which provides Barchart customers with direct access to major North American financial exchanges. The second is expansion into the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2) which provides Barchart with the technology benefits of elastic cloud computing capacity.
The addition of the two new data centers provides Barchart with additional infrastructure and access points to support its expanding market data feed and web-based businesses. Barchart will support a variety of services from each data center, including institutional and retail market data feeds, as well as clients receiving website content and hosting services. The expansion also coincides with the upcoming launch of the redesigned Barchart.com (www.barchart.com) which has been a leading financial website since 1995.
“Offering our data feed clients additional connectivity options has become increasingly more important, as has the ability to immediately scale up infrastructure for needs like operating Barchart.com and hosting website content for third-party sites,” said Eero Pikat, President of Barchart. “Both Equinix and Amazon EC2 provide ideal solutions for these needs,” said Pikat.
To learn more, visit www.barchart.com/solutions.
The CBOE’s C2 exchange, as it will be known, will be joined there by the Boston Options Exchange, which expects to move to the Equinix center in Secaucus in the first quarter of 2010, according to Todd Rich, BOX’ vice president of sales and marketing.
The C2 and BOX matching engines will join the International Securities Exchange there, which said it expects to go live at the same facility by November of next year with new core trading technology. The ISE will operate there then with “massive capacity” on its rebuilt technical platform, according to director Jeanine Hightower.
The Hightower, Rich and Gray comments came at an industry update held Tuesday at the Marriott Marquis by the Options Industry Council and the Futures Industry Association.
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The ISE operation in Secaucus will operate at “extreme low latency,’’ Hightower said, without defining it. The new platform, she said, will succeed technology supplied by Nasdaq OMX, a competing exchange operator.
Also operating at the Equinix hosting center in Secaucus will be the Boston Options Exchange, which recently dropped the “maker-taker” fee model and went back to the “pro rata” model.
“Clearly, we all see a benefit to that particular data center,’’ Rich said of the Equinix facility in Secaucus. He did not elaborate.
Already at Equinix in Secaucus: Electronic exchange pioneer Direct Edge, as well as NYSE Euronext’s Arca largely electronic exchange.
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Immersion was one of the original stocks selling below cash, although was deleted from this group because (1) it no longer sold below cash, and (2) the company announced an internal accounting review of its medical segment. I suggested in a recent post that Immersion (NASDAQ: IMMR) may be worth looking at again down the road. Now that Ramius has filed a 13D, that time has come far earlier than I expected, and this filing was the featured 13D in Barron’s this weekend.
Immersion is basically a situation where some capital intensive assets (the medical segment and parts of the touch segment) are masking some good assets (the royalties and licensing mainly from the touch segment). Some extra protection is also provided as Immersion has a lot of cash on its balance sheet, although the company has not filed a quarterly report since May 2009 due to the accounting investigation. I think that the main question here is how to value Immersion on a sum-of-parts basis, which fortunately is possible as the company breaks out its segment data. However things get a little more complicated here because the touch segment has a product sales revenue stream and development contracts revenue stream that does not produce as high of margins as the licensing and royalties revenue stream, and both segments report negative operating income. Thus, a better way of thinking about how to value Immersion could be to value the company’s patents using the licensing and royalty revenue streams as a proxy.
Back of the Envelope Valuation
Assuming a 5-year average for the licensing and royalty revenues in our valuation amounts to ~$10M. I use the 5-year average here because although licensing and royalty revenues typically have very high margins and are close to pure profit, there are still some expenses associated with this activity, and this helps to act both as a proxy for the potential expenses here and keep our estimates reasonable but conservative. A median estimate using sensitivity tables for the royalty and licensing revenues amounts to around $99M.
As of the company’s last 10-q filing in May, Immersion has just over $80M in cash and no debt. The medical assets I will assume are worth the stated book value of around $10M, with operating leases worth about $8.8M based on a gross up of 8x 2008 operating lease expense. This puts Immersion’s valuation at ~$180M, or $6.44/share. The risk reward scenario looks attractive here.
Disclosure: I do not own shares in Immersion (NASDAQ: IMMR).
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