Ciena's 100G technology will be a core infrastructure component to support the growing bandwidth demands of NYSE Euronext's new state-of-the-art data centres in the greater New York and London metropolitan areas. These facilities are expected to be operational in 2010 and are designed to serve as the company's operational hubs for more than one billion daily transactions comprising petabytes of information.

'It is critically important for NYSE Euronext, in our dual role as an exchange operator and technology company, to ensure a technology and operational infrastructure of the highest quality and integrity, and to provide the highest levels of speed and capacity, lowest latency and maximum flexibility,' says Stanley Young, chief executive of NYSE Technologies and co-global chief investment officer of NYSE Euronext. 'Powering our new data centers and network with Ciena technology will help produce a clear competitive advantage for NYSE Euronext and our customers in terms of executing trades and delivering mission critical information as well as advancing leading edge applications such as state-of-the-art co-location facilities.'

For more than one year, NYSE Technologies' US and European communications engineering teams led by Andy Bach, senior vice president and global head of communications, as well as global IT procurement and legal support services, worked to define an architecture and select a partner to jointly define, create and deploy a solution that would position NYSE Euronext at the forefront of ultra-low latency executions and market data distribution.

Ciena's CN 4200 RS FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, capable of delivering a true 100G data stream over a single wavelength, will play a key role in NYSE Euronext's communications backbone - the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure network - to maximize customers' access to a wide variety of financial information and trading applications.

'Continuing our heritage of optical innovations and industry firsts, we're excited to enable NYSE Euronext to reach new levels of network performance with this 100G network,' says Steve Alexander, chief technology officer at Ciena. 'As the traffic demands of enterprises and service providers continue to escalate beyond current network capacities, our solutions provide customers with network scalability from 1 Mbps to 100 Gbps, ensuring a flexible, simplified and operationally-efficient network foundation to support a wide variety of applications and services.'