The Tokyo GMAC Conference (February 22-24, 2010) has informed us today they’ve closed registration to our “ZLT” event during Workshops A2 and A3 on February 24.  The Workshop holds 200 and 29West is already overbooked a full two weeks in advance of the event.

While we’re proud of the result, we do apologize to any of you who were still planning to attend.  Stay tuned to this blog and www.29West.com for a future Webinar to accommodate you!

In a study released earlier this month, “U.S. Equity Technology 2010: The Sell Side Perspective,” Tabb Group senior analyst Kevin McPartland noted that all bulge bracket firms are “currently either using some form of hardware acceleration or are investigating its use.”

“Third-party middleware products have reached a level of sophistication that the cost required to build a better, faster solution in-house are often hard to justify,” McPartland told Securities Industry News. “However, legacy platforms that were born before the current crop of middleware products, and systems based on paradigms different than those used to create traditional messaging middleware do and will continue to exist.”

Full Story Here

Discover why organizations like NYSE Euronext are using some of the latest high performance networking technology to improve throughput and reduce latency throughout the trade cycle in this webcast that also features TABB Group Senior Analyst Kevin McPartland.

Register Here

The demand for a latency standard has increased with the rise in high-frequency trading, higher trading volumes and more volatility. Latency has been reduced in some cases to microseconds, which makes measurement difficult, said Kevin McPartland, an analyst with the TABB Group. The recent proliferation of data types means that a trader must use multiple systems to monitor and compare trading venues. For example, if one exchange uses a FIX format and another a proprietary one, traders need different systems to measure the speed of information

Full Article Here

The trick is to make sure the money being spent to remove delays will be more than reimbursed by the profits achieved in the trading strategy that is improved by it, says Kevin McPartland, senior analyst at Tabb Group.

“If I’m spending $1M to get one microsecond faster, will I make ten times what I was making before?,” he asks. “Another way of putting it is to say that latency budgeting involves making sure, when you spend so much money over so many weeks on an upgrade effort, that you see multiple times the value spent in additional revenue.”

Full Article Here

Accelerated global demand among financial institutions for 29West high performance messaging solutions drives record company revenue and profitability.

Chicago, USA, 7 January, 2010– 29West, the market leader in high performance, low-latency messaging solutions for financial institutions, announced record revenue and earnings for 2009, effectively doubling its 2008 financial performance.  In Q4 alone, the firm added nine major new customers and nearly doubled the revenue of its previous record quarter set in Q3.

“Capital markets participants of all kinds are increasingly aware of the crucial profit differential to be had from implementing a superior messaging solution across the trade flow.  As a result, we are consistently replacing legacy solutions with 29West solutions,” said 29West president and founder Mark Mahowald after 14 straight quarters of record growth.  “With a record pipeline and more enterprise deals in the works for 2010, we are on our way to almost double our top line growth again this year.”

In all, the firm added more than 20 new customers in 2009, with significant deals in Asia, Europe, and the US.  The more than 140 deployments to date are distributed across large banks, exchanges and hedge funds.  Additions to the customer roster for 2009 include four new global “bulge bracket” bank customers as well as leading firms in India and Canada.

“The accelerating demand for Ultra Messaging^® demonstrates that 29West has become the clear standard among sophisticated players for next-generation messaging solutions across all asset classes, including FX, equities, and fixed income,” Mahowald said.  “The CTOs, CIOs and architects we speak with understand what it’s going to take to build next-generation trading platforms — to meet the current demands of this very competitive trading environment, the same old solutions won’t work.”

29West is hosting a series of events around the globe known as the Zero Latency Tour.  With nearly 300 attendees in London, New York and Chicago in 2009 and more anticipated in Tokyo and other venues in 2010, the firm has continued to emphasize the critical benefits of latency, stability and scalability to all kinds of market participants.

For video highlights from the 2009 Zero Latency Tour and more information on upcoming events, please visit http://www.29west.com/news/events/zero-latency.html

With more than 140 production deployments since 2004 and offices in Chicago, New York, London and Tokyo, 29West provides enterprise strength, enterprise wide messaging for next-generation trading platforms. For more information, visit www.29West.com

The founder and CEO of OnLive, Steve Perlman gives a demonstration of the OnLive cloud based gaming service. Talking to the students of Columbia University, Steve demo’s some games and talks about some of the technology behind the service. Its got to be seen to be believed so watch the video and prepare to witness the future of gaming. I can imagine that these guys will be snapped up soon, if only I had a few spare £mill to invest

Tokyo and Chicago – 4 January, 2010 – 29West, Inc. the market leader in high-performance, low-latency messaging solutions, and INTERTRADE Co., Ltd (INTERTRADE), the market leader in packaged systems for the securities industry, announce a strategic partnership to use 29West products in the development of the INTERTRADE next-generation securities dealing and trading systems.

INTERTRADE, a leading total securities industry solutions provider with more than 60 deployments in Japan, provides dealing and trading systems and other financial technology solutions. Many exchanges in Japan have gone live with next-generation systems, placing a demand on financial firms for high-performance, low-latency and scalable trading systems.

INTERTRADE has entered the partnership with 29West, which has more than 140 financial deployments around the world, and whose technology has been adopted by major banks and exchanges in their next-generation system architecture. Utilizing 29West products, INTERTRADE will be architecting systems with a focus on the benefits of low-latency, high performance messaging.

“We’re very excited to add INTERTRADE to our growing list of financial customers and partners in Japan,” said Mark Mahowald, president and founder of 29West.  “This project is an excellent example of how 29West Ultra Messaging® can significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of trading solutions such as the innovative and well respected INTERTRADE TIGER TRADING system.”

INTERTRADE President Takahiro Ozaki said, “It is important to aim for low latency as technology improves at the exchanges.  A goal of this project is to maximize the performance of the TIGER TRADING system, already widely recognized for its high-speed messaging platform across the technology industry.

“I believe that having a partnership with 29West will add more value and a significant competitive edge to the TIGER TRADING system,” Ozaki added.

About 29West
29West is the leader in high-performance, low-latency messaging solutions for financial institutions. Their Ultra Messaging® family of products provides up to a 10X latency reduction and 100X bandwidth improvement over traditional messaging designs across a wide range of use cases, including streaming, persistence, caching, queuing and desktop distribution. 29West provides customers with the highest performing, most tunable, most controllable, most powerful messaging API in the industry, and allows full end-to-end monitoring capabilities. With more than 140 production deployments since 2004 and offices in Chicago, New York, London and Tokyo, 29West provides enterprise strength, enterprise-wide messaging. For more information, visit http://www.29west.com.

About INTERTRADE
INTERTRADE Co., Ltd (INTERTRADE), headquartered in Chuo-ku, Tokyo, is the market leader in packaged systems for the securities industry. Takahiro Ozaki is the company’s president.  For more information, visit http://www.itrade.co.jp/

29West is pleased to announce the release of LBM version 3.6, including these new features:

• Spectrum –  Allows a topic to be split across multiple channels for use by multiple sources and/or receivers. Provides more granular filtering at the topic level, with no increase in topic resolution traffic.
• Zero Object Delivery –  Allows Java messaging receivers to deliver messages to an application without creating  per-message objects. This allows you to write Java receiving applications that require little to no garbage collection at runtime, producing lower and more consistent message latencies for your Java applications.

Customers can download LBM 3.6 here, or contact Support.

If you’re new to 29West, you can read more about LBM here.

As already stated I’ve been invited to review WebSphere eXtreme Scale book from Packt Publishing. The book is an excellent choice for anyone interested in adopting WebSphere eXtreme Scale in a solution.

WebSphere eXtreme Scale Book

The book starts on chapter one with basic concepts about a data grid and ends up with a hello world like application.

On chapter two it starts to take a deeper dive into WebSphere eXtreme Scale concepts. The first one explored is the ObjectMap API which is composed by the ObjectMap and the BackingMap objects.

Chapter three is the one that specially took my attention since it presented me a feature I had no clue eXtreme Scale had: a JPA like implementation. This is one of the things that makes eXtreme Scale such a nice tool. By now you will probably be thinking: “but what is the difference of having this and eXtreme Scale acting as an ORM cache?”. In fact there’s a great deal of differences – first one: on an ORM solution you’re caching data that when “hydrated” (as Hibernate calls it – this article explains something about hibernate 2nd level cache) becomes objects, so, you still have the time lapse and the memory losses derived from hydrating objects on each request. Another major advantage is that ORM caches are usually invalidated upon some update scenarios which leads to reload of data.

Chapter four covers how to integrate a data grid with a database store. As the book states you’d need to integrate with a database backend to provide a richer and wider set of tools for report generation, to integrate with legacy application that still interact with database, etc.

Chapter five is dedicated to handling increased load. If you thought: “Do I still need to care about load increse?” the answer is “YES! For Sure!”. All and every software needs to be proper configured for increased load, by no means eXtreme Scale would be an exception and this chapter covers important topics of performing planning  for increased load.

Chapter six is devoted to keeping data available, so now it focus on replication and other important points.

Chapter seven (which is also freely available online) presents a rather different pattern of performing tasks in a distributed application – pushing the operation instead of pulling the data.

Chapter eight is dedicated to present some common patterns when using a data grid.

Chapter nine covers some facilities for Spring integration.

And finally chapter ten covers a complete example of a project that is built open eXtreme Scale.

One thing I’d like to see on the books next edition is the ability of replacing WebSphere’s Application Server DynaCache with an eXtreme Scale cache implementation. But it is no surprise for me that this was missing on book since they (the book and this feature) were released almost at the same time, invalidating any possibility of this being covered on the book.

In summary: this is a book I really recommend for anyone interested in picking a data grid solution for Java. It is also more recommended if you are already inclined to use an IBM solution and stick with eXtreme Scale.

LONDON – 17 December, 2009 – Chi-X^® Global Technology, LLC (“Chi-Tech^™”), the technology services unit of Chi-X Global Inc., today announced it will employ messaging technology from 29West in the low-latency market data delivery infrastructure of the company’s MarketPrizm^™ service.

Chi-Tech’s MarketPrizm business provides a comprehensive trading infrastructure solution, powered by an optimized bespoke network linking 19 markets and locations. Designed as a European trading “ecosystem” for use by banks and investment firms, MarketPrizm provides neutral, high speed access to the region’s market centers, low latency market data and a range of third-party applications and services.   MarketPrizm was created as a one-stop solution for data, services and connectivity to the European markets, offering trading firms of all sizes a cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for all types of electronic trading.

29West Messaging, which powers financial applications in over 130 deployments worldwide, is a fast, efficient and lightweight system designed to serve as a messaging fabric for the next generation of high-performance, high-volume applications.

“We’re excited that 29West Messaging will help power the low-latency performance of market data delivery in MarketPrizm,” said Mark Mahowald, President and Founder of 29West. “Lowering system latency delivers immense value to firms trading in today’s markets, and 29West is happy to bring our unique expertise in this area to help provide competitive advantage to Chi-Tech’s MarketPrizm customers.”

“We try to partner with specialized providers where it makes sense for our clients and our development strategy,” said Richard Leung, Chi-Tech’s Chief Technology Officer. “In this case, we selected the 29West product for its demonstrated performance and the fact that many banks and trading firms have already implemented 29West products in other parts of their infrastructures.”

MarketPrizm’s range of connectivity options, market data feeds and component applications are delivered via a flexible framework that allows clients to select the precise solution that meets their business and technology requirements.

MarketPrizm is a Chi-Tech business line focused on providing trading infrastructure and services to banks, funds, and other investment and trading firms. In a separate business line, the company also provides trading technology platforms to exchanges and market centers.

As the technology services unit of Chi-X Global Inc., Chi-X Global Technology, LLC (“Chi-Tech”) provides high performance trading infrastructure and services for financial markets and participants. For exchanges and market centers, the company provides comprehensive trading infrastructure solutions, using a scalable platform of advanced marketplace technology and tools. For banks, funds and other market participants, the company’s MarketPrizm business line offers a fully-managed trading network and ecosystem comprised of multi-venue connectivity, colocation and hosting, low latency market data, and leading third-party applications. Chi-Tech’s focus is delivering solutions that help the world’s marketplaces and their participants to lower costs, reduce risk and maximize competitive advantage. For more information on the company, visit www.chi-tech.com.

• Market Data Latency
• Real-time Market Data Management

Chicago, USA, and London, 9 December, 2009 – 29West, the market leader in high-performance, low-latency messaging solutions, today announced it has been awarded the Financial-i fourth annual Leaders in Innovation Award in two sub-categories of Data Management: Market Data Latency and Real-time Market Data Management.

In the Market Data Latency category, 29West prevailed over other finalists NYSE Euronext and Thomson Reuters; in the Real-time Market Data Management category, 29West beat Interactive Data and KX Systems.

Winners of the Leaders in Innovation Awards include global transaction banks and financial hardware and software vendors that, according to Financial-i, “have excelled in the past 12 months in terms of innovation in business solutions across wholesale transaction banking, encompassing Treasury & FX, securities services, data management, risk management, and network services.”

Financial-i reports that the companies originally shortlisted for the awards are not self-nominated, but selected based on research by Financial-i journalists and independent analysts. An advisory panel made up of analysts, consultants and market practitioners then review the list. Winners in each category are chosen based on the feedback from the panel.  Financial-i says the Leaders in Innovation Awards specifically recognize those companies that demonstrate an ongoing commitment to innovation.

Financial-i has established the following criteria for the awards:

• Innovations in global transaction banking business solutions over the last 12 months

• Upgrades made to existing solutions

• Functionality enhancements

• Depth and breadth of functionality

• Customer service segments

• The ease with which customers can implement and interface with solutions

• How solutions help companies solve common business issues

Full coverage of the winners will be featured in the Q4 2009 edition of Financial-i later this month.  For more information, visit www.financial-i.com

“We are very pleased to receive these awards,” said 29West President and Founder Mark Mahowald.  “It’s gratifying to be recognized for our innovations in moving the latency target ever closer to zero, and providing a more powerful next-generation messaging backbone under our customers’ applications.”  The awards come on the heels of 29West’s 13^th straight quarter of record revenue.  The firm expects to close out 2009 strong, with about a 70-percent revenue increase for 2009 over 2008.  More than 130 banks, exchanges, trading firms and hedge funds have deployed 29West in their organizations.

Hi All,
Here comes the news w.r.t. low latency systems!

Ittiam today unveils its complete software systems for latency sensitive applications ranging from conferencing to surveillance.
These can deliver an end-to-end latency as low as 60 ms for high definition video. Designed to cater to a wide range of real-time communication and fast response interactive video applications, these systems deliver full frame rate, high quality video at very low latencies.

This suite of low-latency systems are available on multiple TI platforms including TMS320DM646x, TMS320DM36x, TMS320DM644x and OMAP35x and support multiple compression formats. They can be customized for deployment in WiFi, cellular or best-effort networks and can also be easily scaled and integrated into highly custom and specialized applications.

Want to know more? Then have a look at the full PR from the PRNewswire website or on the Ittiam news webpage.

Please go ahead with any question or comments on low latency embedded systems!

News for low latency systems…
So stay connected! You will learn more in the days to come.

Anyone designing a high performance transaction processing system has already needed at least a caching solution for increasing response time on frequently used data. But sometimes these data might become bigger than usual, those are times when you need a sofisticate

WebSphere eXtreme Scale Book

solution, something that can automatically fetch data from a slower storage, offload when not necessary, split its contents between various nodes, …

If you require something like this then you’ll notice that you need a DataGrid solution.

By now you’ll be asking yourself why I am on that subject? Recently I’ve been kindly invited to review a book about IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale from Packt Publishing.

Apart from this, I work on a project where we were already evaluating WebSphere eXtreme Scale as a replacement for WebSphere DynaCache.

If you are in a hurry and want to have a sneak peak on the book contents, take a look at the sample chapter (Chapter 7: “The DataGrid API”) available for free on Packt Publishing website.

Almost everyone agrees on one thing regarding financial reform – the need for more transparency.  Price transparency, market transparency and open position transparency have been talked about quite a bit.  But within the SEC’s recent equity market structure concept document they’ve brought into focus a new one: “latency transparency”.

Full Perspective Here