Lucera Financial Infrastructures and Perseus announced Wednesday that they’ve teamed up for an on-demand network that runs across fiber and is designed for the financial industry.

The deal ties Lucera's proprietary software-defined networking (SDN) stack with Perseus's fiber network, which provides traders with cross-connection points in more than 241 counter-parties in 53 co-location centers across 24 cities, 15 countries, and six continents.

Lucera’s SDN stack runs on top of Perseus’s Layer 1 and Layer 2 fiber to enable flow-based routing. The service also provides provisioning, IP address management, load balancing, and fail-over, according to Lucera CEO Jake Loveless.

Lucera was founded two years ago, with backing from Cantor Fitzgerald, to target the financial services industry. The intention in partnering with Perseus is to reduce implementation cycles to no more than two days, as opposed to the industry's 90-day norm.

Serving Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks, exchanges, broker-dealers, and buy-side firms, Lucera provides on-demand, scalable infrastructure supported by a global SDN implementation based in 56 co-location data centers on five continents. Lucera claims to have the world’s largest on-demand SDN for the financial sector.

Lucera has two product offerings. Compute provides on-demand, co-located compute services, while Connect is the on-demand global SDN that provides a connection for each application. Loveless wrote in an email to SDxCentral that BT Radianz is Connect's closest rival.

On the compute side, competitors "are do-it-yourself and traditional outsourced hosting providers," Loveless writes. "Public cloud (e.g., Amazon) isn't a real solution for the latency and geographically critical use cases."

For this business, the latency factor can be a killer. “Because of our client – financial services – performance means an entirely different thing,” Loveless said during a panel yesterday at the OPNFV Summit. “You’ve got trading that’s happening at a couple of billion dollars per second.”

Lucera doesn’t use white-box switches. “We still feel there's performance advantages with modern switches,” Loveless writes.

Privately held Lucera is headquartered in New York, with offices in London and Chicago. Prior to joining Lucera, Loveless was head of high-frequency trading at Cantor Fitzgerald.