Microsoft has acquired a stake in the London Stock Exchange, and in return will see the financial company use the cloud firm’s technologies.

The company this week announced a 10-year strategic partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). The deal will see the cloud company acquire a stake in the stock exchange firm and co-develop future solutions with LSEG, while LSEG will migrate to Microsoft Cloud.

Microsoft will also purchase an approximately four percent equity stake in LSEG through the acquisition of shares from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium.

“We are delighted to welcome Microsoft as a shareholder. We believe our partnership with Microsoft will transform the way our customers discover, analyze and trade securities around the world, and create substantial value over time. We look forward to delivering on that potential,” said David Schwimmer, CEO of London Stock Exchange Group.

The cloud company said the partnership includes $2.8 billion in minimum spend commitments from LSEG for cloud services and support.

As part of the agreement, LSEG’s technology infrastructure and data and analytics platforms will be migrated onto the Microsoft Cloud. LSEG’s data platform and other key technology infrastructure will migrate into Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment.

This will include Refinitiv platforms, used by more than 40,000 financial institutions in 190 countries with data, analytics, and insights across millions of active time series databases, daily evaluations, exchange trades and derivatives, equity quotes, and significant research on public and private companies.

Microsoft said the companies will co-create an ‘open, centralized, financial data platform’ that will enable ‘new monetization opportunities across the financial services ecosystem’. The press release seems to suggest much of this will be redesigning existing LSE analytics and modeling offerings using Microsoft tools and technologies including Microsoft Azure AI, Synapse, Power BI, Excel, and Teams.

“This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG’s journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business and will transform the experience for our customers,” said LSEG CEO Schwimmer.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s EVP, cloud, and AI group, is expected to be appointed as a non-executive director of LSEG in the future.

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, of Microsoft, said: “Our partnership will bring together the industry leadership of the London Stock Exchange Group with the trust and breadth of the Microsoft Cloud — spanning Azure, AI, and Teams — to build next-generation services that will empower our customers to generate business insights, automate complex and time-consuming processes, and ultimately, do more with less.”

London Stock Exchange (LSE) is currently based at a fully owned and operated City of London data center which serves LSE, Turquoise, Turquoise Europe, and CurveGlobal trading venues, and offers hosting services. But the company is understood to be planning for a move to a new London data center at the Telehouse facility in east London. Refinitiv, a provider of financial market data and infrastructure LSE acquired earlier in the year, is reportedly due to migrate the other way; leaving its Docklands Technical Centre in Poplar to the Cyxtera LHR1 data center in Slough.

Earlier this year, Microsoft signed a deal with Eurobank bank UBS to move more than 50 percent of its applications, including critical workloads, running on Microsoft Azure over the next five years. The bank previously moved around one-third of its infrastructure to Azure between 2018 and 2021.

Nasdaq completes migration of options market to AWS, Yahoo planning migration too

Last week Nasdaq, Inc. announced it has successfully completed the migration of the core trading system of Nasdaq MRX – one of its six US options exchanges – to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company said the new cloud-enabled system, which uses AWS Outposts, will see a 10 percent performance improvement in round-trip latency.

“Our markets are responsible for seamlessly transacting hundreds of billions of dollars a day serving millions of investors globally,” said Brenda Hoffman, SVP and head of technology, US markets systems, and investment intelligence at Nasdaq. “Therefore, our top priority has been managing our cloud journey while improving our industry-leading latency and resiliency standards that the industry has come to expect from Nasdaq. With the successful migration of MRX, we look to further expand client access to cloud-enabled capabilities including co-location services, market analytics, and machine learning, enabling our clients to adopt new services and technologies with agility and flexibility.”

Last year Nasdaq announced plans to migrate to AWS infrastructure but also bring AWS infrastructure into its on-premise network. The stock exchange firm is undergoing an expansion of its on-premise infrastructure at Equinix’s NY11 data center in Carteret, New Jersey.

This month has also seen Yahoo select AWS as its preferred public cloud provider for its advertising technology business Yahoo Ad Tech.

Yahoo Ad Tech expanding its existing relationship with AWS and migrating all of its advertising technology workloads—including its media-buying and supply-side platforms, analytics, and identity solutions and products—from its on-premises data centers to AWS.

The Yahoo Ad Tech platform already uses AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute instances for insights on real-time advertising performance, and plans to create a centralized data lake to store hundreds of petabytes of data.

“By harnessing the power of AWS, we’ll be able to move faster and give our customers what they value most—advertising solutions that provide the right combination of performance, audiences, and revenue growth,” said Aaron Lake, senior vice president of platforms engineering and chief information officer at Yahoo. “Running all of Yahoo Ad Tech on AWS provides us with a broad portfolio of world-class services that will allow us to help advertisers achieve the returns they want by providing them with precise audience targeting, while our ad publisher customers are able to scale and monetize their ad space.”

Euronext, another stock exchange firm, this year completed its migration from a data center outside London to an Aruba facility outside Milan in Itlay. The company blamed the regulatory uncertainty of Brexit as one of its reasons for moving.