Icap Selects Tervela Messaging Technology for Electronic Broking Business

Icap has selected Tervela technology to support a global messaging infrastructure for its electronic broking division Icap Electronic Broking (IEB). Tervela's TMX message switches, TPE persistence engines and the TPM provisioning and management system beat IBM's MQLLM solution as well as products from Tibco Software, RTI, Solace Systems and 29West in a rigorous nine-month product evaluation and sales process that came down to a bake-off between Tervela's hardware-based solution and a software-driven messaging system.

According to Dean Mazboudi, head of enterprise architecture and IT strategy for interdealer broker and post-trade services provider IEB, “Tervela was the choice for low-latency messaging for our global trading infrastructure. The intention is to establish a services framework on top of a high-performance, low-latency messaging infrastructure that will serve as a foundation and provide building blocks to build and extend IEB’s trading platforms and services.”

IEB started the global messaging infrastructure project in the third quarter of 2009 and is undergoing a phased implementation. The first phase will focus on establishing a middle-tier infrastructure and high-speed messaging fabric, with later phases adding a set of common services and integrating components and services. Tervela kit will be deployed in IEB’s labs for development and testing, and in its global data centres to meet the information distribution demands – essentially performance, low-latency and scalability – of its fixed income and foreign exchange electronic trading customers.

Mazboudi is confident that IEB will achieve an immediate return on its investment in Tervela, in terms of ease of integration, time to market and lower development and maintenance costs. “Tervela’s message network provides a high-performance scalable architecture that is feature rich and easy to implement,” he says. “This facilitates accelerated and consistent applications delivery with centralised management and control for full operational visibility and provisioning.”

IEB’s product selection process was one of the most comprehensive and diligent Tervela has ever been involved in, according to the vendor’s founder and CTO, Barry Thompson. “IEB wanted a technology and business solution,” he says. “The selection process included many elements, including total cost of ownership, the need for a global solution and the ability to develop and implement applications relatively easily and quickly. We could offer an enterprise-class solution, based on a single unified platform with the best messaging, global reach and quality of service.”

The TMX-500 message switches being deployed by IEB are Tervela’s latest switching products and have been available for about nine months. They support what IEB is aiming to achieve by providing a common, high-performance scalable architecture that enables accelerated and consistent application delivery, centralised management and control of the network, powerful, but lightweight API support for rapid client integration, as well as guaranteed message delivery and data persistence without performance degradation.

“A common framework and open architecture are important,” says Thompson. “The common framework overcomes the challenge of custom building each new application and accelerates application development and deployment. An open architecture avoids vendor lock-in and means you can plug pretty much anything in. We believe Tervela is one of few vendors that can provide the best of both worlds – global infrastructure based on an open platform and the performance expected of a specialist messaging provider.”

While the development of global messaging networks has, in the past, been a piecemeal affair, there is no dispute that messaging has become critical to success in financial markets, leading many organisations to revisit their solutions with a view to improving not only performance, but also scope and scale.

“We leverage a neighbour-based messaging architecture that optimises elements such as wide area network links for large geographic areas. This enables a pervasive messaging fabric,” says Thompson.

As well as providing smart technology, Tervela argues that its hardware products provide ‘compelling data centre economics compared to traditional messaging middleware solutions’. The company claims a lower TCO for its hardware products than the TCO for software solutions, citing increased efficiency as well as lower power and operational costs. It claims messaging efficiency of 16,000 messages per second per Watt, as opposed to 250 to 500 messages per second per Watt using a software solution and says multiple racks of processers running middleware can be reduced to just one specialist hardware box.

“It is possible to reduce the technology footprint by 90%, which means cutting the cost of space, power and cooling. Using Tervela technology also takes half the time that it takes using software solutions to deploy applications. It all adds up,” says Thompson, adding that the platform includes such features as security and digital rights management.