South African IT solutions provider Bytes Connect has installed infrastructure to take the new Zambian Securities Exchange live.

The new Bonds and Derivatives Exchange (BaDex) has been launched in Lusaka, with infrastructure and applications sourced in South Africa, says Bytes in a statement.

South African Financial solutions firm Securities and Trading Technology (STT) was contracted to supply the bond and derivative trading software. STT’s infrastructure partner, Bytes Connect, procured, custom-built and installed the infrastructure layer, a statement says.

Bytes Connect programme manager Dermot Collins, who oversaw the project, says that while Bytes does have a presence in Zambia, the company found a shortage of the necessary skills and resources in the country.

Subsequently, Bytes decided to procure the components and build the system in South Africa.

Collins says the Bytes team also discovered when assessing the BaDex premises that the system needed to be hosted off-site, and advised that it should be hosted at the Zamtel Data Centre in Lusaka.

“The infrastructure, utilising Dell servers and storage, Cisco switches and Microsoft Hyper V, was installed, configured and built at our premises in Bedfordview (in Johannesburg, South Africa), where the applications were installed and tested,” says Collins.

“With local conditions and requirements in mind, we designed the infrastructure as a self-contained system in a single, 2 metre high cabinet. It includes redundancy on as many levels as possible, with dual UPS, dual load balances and dual switches for failover.”

The system was then taken apart and shipped to Zambia by Bytes’ logistics partner.

There, it was tested again and deployed, say Bytes officials.

Dominic Kabanje, CEO of BaDex, has said he is optimistic that the new system could help the exchange to compete internationally for bond and derivatives business.