Welcome to the Beeks Technology Blog

It’s great to have you!

We wanted to start this blog to share some of the interesting work that Beeks does. Technology and finance are two words that can be a bit offputting to people. It’s certainly true that both industries have their fair share of ‘authority through obscurity’, where difficult concepts help to keep power more tightly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant companies.

At Beeks, we believe these industries should be as difficult to understand as they need to be, but not more. And we want to encourage people who may be considering a career in these industries to find a way in.

We also want to help customers and potential customers to understand our products. Quite often we find that there’s more that we want to communicate about our products than we can easily fit into a press release or on our website. We feel that this technically-focused blog is a perfect place to get more out there.

We’re also inspired by the other tech company blogs that we love — Skyscanner, Netflix and Airbnb for example.

We hope this will also contain good pointers to other resources out there. They could help you if you are involved in the IT infrastructure of capital markets.

You don’t have to read every article. We’re hoping that you’ll find articles you like when you need them. You can use the links between the articles and to other websites to find out as much as you need to know.

Our hope is that you find the posts on this blog useful. We hope that they inspire you or help you in your career.

What does Beeks do that might interest you?

We’re a technology provider for the financial markets — so a FinTech for short. We offer infrastructure as a service — that is, hosted compute and connectivity in the locations where clients need to be. We’re a publicly listed company (on the London Stock Exchange AIM market).

We provide automation with the infrastructure that we provide, so that clients can turn on, turn off or reprovision their compute as flexibly as they do in the public cloud.

Why do your customers use Beeks when they could just host in the public cloud?

Well, maybe one day all of the financial markets will move to the big public cloud providers — and you might read some speculation on this blog of how fast that move is happening — but at the moment, it’s not all there, and it’s not just because ‘it takes time’.

There are capabilities that the public cloud providers don’t provide which make it hard for firms to move some types of workload there.

Beeks concentrates our work on filling the gaps that are blocking capital markets clients from hosting in the cloud:

• We provide custom security models, for example, the ability to physically audit and control the equipment that we are hosting for our customers — something that is impossible for public cloud providers to do.
• We provide low latency direct access to the venues and counterparties that clients need to connect to — something that isn’t easily possible in public cloud. We natively support multicast protocols that are currently cumbersome to implement in the public cloud. These protocols are heavily used in financial markets.
• We provide a trained 24x7 Network Operations Centre to assist our clients with provisioning or onboarding questions, with a higher level SLA than public cloud providers are able to offer.
• We provide access to bare metal servers (as well as virtual servers), in the locations that are important for financial markets.
• We make it easy for clients to subdivide the infrastructure they take from us (make it ‘multitenant’), so that they can offer parts of the service to their own customers. This is a common requirement for different types of financial market customers.
• We can provide clients with wire-level visibility and analytics of the performance of anything they run in our cloud. So clients have a real view of their performance.

Where are Beeks based?

Our head office is in Braehead, Glasgow, in the U.K., and that’s where most of our team is based, but we do have other people working for us in various different locations around the world. But we operate infrastructure around the world, including Asia, Australia, continental Europe and the USA.

What’s to come?

We’ll provide some insights into the technology work that we do at Beeks, in case it’s of interest to you in your work, or as background in case you’d like to come and work at Beeks. If you decide that you’d like to join Beeks after reading this blog, then that’s great… we’d love to talk to you!

Some articles will be quite technical , but others will be at a higher level. Hopefully you can find your way in them. Or, if you stumble on just one article from a web search, then maybe you’ll find other articles alongside that are useful for you.

If you have questions or comments on the blog, please post them as comments or contact us via our website. If you have suggestions that can improve any particular blog post, please get in touch and we promise to update the original post so that it is more accurate. We’ll make sure to thank you by name where we do this in the blog text (unless you want to stay anonymous).

We’re going to aim to publish something here every 2 weeks — although the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so it’s possible that we struggle to achieve that sometimes. Maybe if something is particularly newsworthy we might post more frequently as well.