29West and Exegy Collaborate for Enterprise Market Data Distribution

Messaging specialist 29West is collaborating with Exegy to integrate the latter's hardware-accelerated ticker plant with its Latency Busters Messaging (LBM) middleware, in what the companies are pitching as a "strategic new offering" for enterprise-wide market data distribution. The tie-up provides 29West with new options for data feed handlers and Exegy with a high fan-out distribution mechanism, as well as a strong middleware partner.

According to Jeff Wells, vice president of product management at Exegy, the two vendors have created a "strong integration," which involved embedding LBM software libraries within the Exegy Ticker Plant appliance in order to minimise latency in the hand off between the ticker plant data feed handler software and the messaging middleware. The 2U format appliance - which features both a traditional x86 processor as well as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processors - is network connected via a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection for the LBM transport.

Wells says the integration with 29West was driven by requests from both existing customers and prospects to interface the ticker plant with a "much larger number of applications deeper into their enterprises," compared to deployments to date, which have been focused on driving a small number of applications, such as for algorithmic trading. As such, the collaboration should benefit Exegy and make its product more attractive as a component of a more multi-purpose market data distribution offering.

"Through this integration with Exegy, we have found another innovative way to support customers in their drive towards the lowest latency with cost-effective, high performance market data for the enterprise,” says 29West's global head of sales Annalisa Sarasini.

In particular, the Exegy option provides 29West with an alternative to feed handlers supplied by its long-time partner NYSE Technologies. That partnership began before the then Wombat Financial Software was acquired (by NYSE) and began to develop its own messaging product. With competition between the partners increasing, it makes sense for 29West to look at alternatives.

Last month, 29West announced a partnership with SR Labs for the integration of that company's data feed handlers with LBM. 29West is continuing to develop its LBM software, and has plans to shortly release an update that will reduce latency for applications running on the same server and communicating via shared memory. Specifically, it expects to reduce the latency of its inter-process communications (IPC) facility from around three microseconds to less than one.

Separately last month, in a further move that demonstrates how it is moving from a specific low-latency focus to a more general purpose messaging one, 29West introduced a Java Message Service API for its Ultra Messaging with Queuing product, offering latencies of less than 100 microseconds at a throughput of greater than one million messages per second.

While JMS is not well suited for extreme front-office trading and order routing applications, its open API and inherent Java support has proven popular for integrating middle- and back-office, applications, such as risk management and trade processing.