Foreign Exchange Company CME Receives $1 Billion Investment From Google Cloud In A 10-Year Cloud Computing Deal

Chicago based CME Group has received a $1 billion investment from Google, as well as a separate agreement to shift the futures exchange operator's trading operations to the cloud.

As reported, according to the conditions of Google and CME's 10-year relationship, the exchange operator will begin migrating its technical infrastructure to Google Cloud next year.

The deal with CME is a huge success for Google's cloud division, which competes for large, lucrative contracts from Fortune 500 businesses against Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp.

The Tech Crunch reported that according to Philip Moyer, vice president of strategic industries at Google Cloud, this isn't your typical transaction where Google just assists the customer in moving workloads to the cloud.

“Instead, this is really a demonstration by Google and CME, that we’re really committed to the long-term journey necessary to take the hardest elements of the financial services industry to the cloud,” Moyer added.

He claims that the sale is complicated since CME has some of the most stringent security, latency, redundancy, and recovery criteria. The firms aren't disclosing how the arrangement is structured in terms of costs, but the idea is to roll it out in stages, starting with the simplest workloads with the shortest latency needs and then moving on to data analytic tooling.

Moyer said: “In the second phase we’re really focused on trying to innovate by doing more real-time data and analytics and creating new products and making the markets more efficient.”

As reported, the organisations plan to migrate the most latency-sensitive components of the workloads to the cloud in the final phase.

“It’s really a phased approach, taking one of the largest and most diverse exchanges in the world up into the cloud. And along the way, Google intends to use its global network, its resiliency, its AI/ML, its data technologies, its global accessibility to enhance CMEs resiliency and accessibility on a worldwide basis,” added the VP.

According to the firms, Google's $1 billion equity investment was made in CME's non-voting convertible preferred stock. The partnership with Google will enable CME to provide easier access to more market players, save expenses and streamline IT infrastructure and other processes.

Moyer said: “I think one of the things that I would tell you that’s different about this relationship than maybe other kinds of traditional vendor relationships, where you just kind of get awarded an RFP or RFI, is that we’re committing to the engineering necessary to get to the finish line.”

“We are not potentially starting years from now. We’re starting day one, on the journey together across all three phases,” he added.

However, Google ranked third in the cloud infrastructure market in Q3 with $4.5 billion in sales, accounting for 10 per cent of the market. According to Synergy Research, industry leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated more than $16 billion in revenue, accounting for 33 per cent of the market. In the third quarter, the whole market hit $45 billion.