"Today's traders are demanding best execution and the lowest latency possible while offloading IT management headaches and unnecessary costs so that they can focus on what they do best -- trade," said Graham Miller, CEO of Marketcetera, in a statement. "By working with NYSE Technologies, we can offer this end-to-end solution through a managed hosting model. Clients can expect to receive reduced costs, flexibility and performance advantages that they require to compete in this era of high frequency trading."

NYSE's datacenters will welcome every market, including those the company competes with, Young said. "We will aggregate data and make it available within the datacenter faster than what companies can do on their own. The datacenter will be open to other markets -- call them competitors if you will."

He claimed that the datacenters will enable better competition. "Markets should compete, not infrastructure," he said, which may be an easy claim to make if you're proposing that everyone use your infrastructure.

Customers will be able to build what they want to build. "Our datacenters will have smart hands and racks. I know that some racks are your secret sauce. Some companies want to roll their own, and some want hand holding."

Companies will come to the service because the financial industry has been humbled. "Gone are the days when you could write a blank check to build your own system," Young said. "We will work with you on the cost-performance balancing act. This is a managed services play supported by our SuperFeed service and SFTI network."

(SFTI stands for Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure and is pronounced "safety." According to NYSE, SFTI is "a highly reliable and resilient carrier class network infrastructure" built to "serve the entire securities industry as a central access facility for trading systems, clearing and settlement systems, market data distribution, and other core industry utilities.")

"In summary, I admit that the NYSE lost its technological leadership," Young said. "We've invested $1 billion in technology and are 18 months into the biggest transformation of any exchange. By the end of 2010, we will have the lowest latency datacenters built with fiber optic cables alongside a complete SFTI infrastructure."

Asked about latency between the London area and New York area datacenters, Young said that there are four or five 10 Gbps pipes connecting them, running under the ocean. "The latency is as low as you can get, given the distance," he said.