Nasdaq and AWS Partner to Transform Capital Markets

Global Sourcing & Technology Transactions partner James McPhillips and associate Mia Rendar in Washington, DC led Pillsbury’s support of Nasdaq’s in-house legal team in the negotiations.

Beginning in 2022, Nasdaq plans to migrate its North American markets to AWS in a phased approach, starting with Nasdaq MRX, a U.S. options market. Nasdaq will use a new edge computing solution that is co-designed by Nasdaq and AWS and specifically developed for market infrastructure. This solution may also be used by other market infrastructure operators and market participants to move their trading systems to the cloud. In addition, the partnership will include opportunities to explore new ways to leverage AWS’s cloud capabilities across Nasdaq’s anti-financial crime, data and analytics, and market infrastructure software solutions.

Core to Nasdaq’s move to AWS will be AWS Outposts, which extend AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Nasdaq plans to incorporate AWS Outposts directly into its core network to deliver ultra-low-latency edge compute capabilities from its primary data center in Carteret, New Jersey. This co-designed edge computing solution would effectively establish Nasdaq’s data center as the first-ever private AWS Local Zone for the capital markets industry.

To learn more, visit www.nasdaq.com/cloud.

In addition to McPhillips and Rendar, the Pillsbury team included support from Global Sourcing & Technology Transactions partners Jim Alberg, Steve Farmer, Vipul Nishawala and Liz Zimmer, associate Mark Booth, consulting principals Joe Nash and Roger Roy, and consulting manager Mike Beasley. Other Pillsbury colleagues included Litigation counsel David Oliwenstein, Insurance Recovery & Advisory partner Tamara Bruno and senior law clerk Shade Oladetimi.