IBM WebSphere Adds Hong Kong, Singapore Feed Handlers, Prepares for LSE’s Millennium

IBM has added new feed handlers for exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore to its WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets platform, and enhanced feed handlers for the London Stock Exchange and Turquoise to comply with the LSE’s forthcoming Millennium Exchange trading platform. The additional feeds bring to more than 100 the number of data feeds for which WebSphere offers handlers.

In its latest set of releases, IBM has added feed handlers for three Asian data feeds: the Hong Kong Exchange’s Price Reporting System (PRS) feed, and the Singapore Exchange’s DerivativesQuote enhanced feed and Securities Market direct feed.

The Hong Kong Exchange PRS provides real-time information for securities traded on the Hong Kong Futures Exchange and the Stock Options Market of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. These products include stock futures, equity index products, interest rate and fixed income products.

The SGX DerivativesQuote enhanced feed provides real-time data for all futures and options products traded on the SGX derivatives market. This includes level 1 and level 2 data. The SGX Securities Market Direct Feed provides real-time data for all SGX-listed stocks. This includes level 1 and level 2 data.

For the onset of LSE’s new Millennium Exchange trading platform – built by 2009 acquisition MillenniumIT to replace the existing TradElect system – IBM has released WebSphere Front Office feed handlers for both LSE and the Turquoise hybrid lit/dark market it acquired this year. For the LSE market, WebSphere is enhancing its feed handler for both level 1 and level 2 data.

In addition to these enhancements, IBM has updated a group of exchange feedhandlers to stay current with the latest specifications and other change notifications that it has received. These include:

• NYSE Euronext’s Universal Trading Platform (UTP) Cash Level 1 and level 2, updated to support the new specification v2.3;
• Nasdaq OMX’s Global Index Data Service (Gids), is updated to support the new specification v2010-1.0;
• Bolsa Comercio de Santiago, updated to support the new specification v1.7.7.

According to IBM, “In addition to the distribution of market data, WebSphere Front Office feed handlers can provide data normalisation, data blending, value-added calculations, and custom data integration including call-outs, contributions, and publication.” WebSphere Front Office feed handlers manage streaming data coming into or out of the WebSphere Front Office infrastructure. The three major functions of each feed handler are connectivity, data processing, and control and administration.

WebSphere Front Office feed handlers can provide connectivity to exchanges or feed providers through their protocol, which can vary from standard multicast to proprietary TCP/IP. The feed handlers support both one-way broadcast feeds and bi-directional feeds that are interactive or that support data contribution. Handlers for interactive feeds can enable subscription, data recovery, and other services.

The feed handlers perform a number of data processing functions, including: message processing and conversion; data quality assurance; inline computations; cache operations; and data delivery.

Finally, the feed handlers process incoming message streams and convert messages from feed-specific formats to a common data format. The format is flexible yet compact, allowing mapping to all fields required by various feeds, while keeping the message size small for performance.