If only it was as simple as plugging and unplugging.

CME Group completed the migration of the contracts from e-cbot to its CME Globex platform in January, a multi-step process that involved bringing industry participants together to help map out the plan, five mock trading sessions and finally, in January, two separate migrations - first commodity and index products followed by the high-volume U.S. Treasury complex.

"It's a large effort in that it's not only something CME Group needed to deal with, but the broader customer base," says Kevin Kometer, CME Group managing director and deputy CIO. "We had to make sure they were comfortable because so many customers are affected."

Combining CME and Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) products all on one trading platform was one of the main value propositions for the combination of the two exchanges. Customers now have the entire spectrum of U.S. interest rate contracts on one platform - along with benchmark stock indices, grains and livestock contracts. Simply put, Kometer says having CME and CBOT products on CME Globex "will make life easier for customers."

Firms will only have to connect to one platform while customers tap into the widest array of products found on one platform.

CME Group had just four months to make the migration happen following the close of the merger deal with CBOT Holdings Inc. last July. The product migration to CME Globex is the largest project since CME and CBOT forged the common clearing link in 2003.

Behind the scenes, CME Group's IT department needed to scale up the CME Globex infrastructure to handle the new products. CBOT's Treasury contracts alone represent a massive amount of volume - trading an average daily volume of 3.1 million contracts in 2007, almost half of the 6.9 million interest rate contracts traded daily at CME Group.

While CME Globex is often touted as the matching engine for CME Group, the platform is actually comprised of a suite of matching engines. CME Globex has a matching engine for Eurodollar contracts, another for foreign exchange and commodities contracts and another for the New York Mercantile Exchange contracts, which are also hosted by CME Globex. To handle the incoming products, CME Group had to add more matching engines to handle the CBOT grains complex and U.S. Treasury contracts.

"We've added a number of matching engines to support the Board of Trade products," Kometer says. "So it's not a capacity issue for CME Globex.And throughout the order entry side,we scaled that out, along with the market data infrastructure specifically for Board of Trade products."

End-users may not notice any major changes, but there will be more volume and data flowing through their firm's CME Globex connections. Customers will also see more functionality on the CME Globex platform which wasn't available before.

In 2008, CME will continue to roll out enhancements and upgrades to the CME Globex platform. The ongoing push for faster execution on CME Globex took a major step forward earlier this year when CME Group lowered its response times by 50 percent in peak periods to 16.5 milliseconds from an average of 31 milliseconds.

CME Globex also began hosting block trading functionality on certain interest rate contracts in February. CME Group will be introducing more inter-commodity spreading on the platform as well.

For CME Group, one trading platform is designed to serve customers more effectively.

"It's a big win for customers in that they will have one platform with a good track record in performance and capacity," Kometer says.

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