NYSE Euronext is…

Posted on June 5th, 2008

1 An exchange
2 A secure financial network
3 A software provider
4 An ultra high speed market data provider
5 Hosted software as a service
6 All of the above

Answer: 6

“For the big guys who are concerned about infinite configurability and are able to create the world in their own image, we sell software,” explains Ken Barnes, VP Hosted Solutions at Wombat, a member of NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions. “For everyone else who wants SaaS, we can roll these offerings up to provide a service that resides on a safe network, and the entire environment is hosted and managed. Users leverage it as a service and the whole operation becomes a lot less expensive to run. And we constantly invest in R&D to make sure the platform is the fastest and the best in the world.”

Fastest and best explain why NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions is working closely with Intel to obtain the highest possible performance from Intel processors.

Barnes sees the exchange world evolving into a group of mega powers including NYSE Euronext, NASDAQ OMX, Deutsche Borse, CME and the LSE and a second tier of regional exchanges, such as Malaysia and Brazil.

“We could partner with them and leverage our technologies, know-how and network and that would allow them to focus on customers.”

A key competitive advantage in the global market place is the speed of the Wombat Market Data Platform which NYSE Euronext acquired in January. The NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions group works closely with Intel to get the best possible performance from Intel processors to maintain its leadership in high¬speed, high-volume data handling.

“We have a deep R&D relationship which is helping us develop the next generation Wombat Data Fabric middleware,” says Barnes. “We are working closely with Intel whose architecture we find valuable because it is increasing its front-side bus in line with compute capacity. As the Nehalem processor becomes available, we expect even better performance because we do so much I/O between the CPU and memory, and the new chip wil have a great impact on our ability to deliver more messages per second.”

Wombat Data Fabric has shared memory for remote direct memory access from application to application across servers without any use of the CPU for network traffic, allowing the applications to share memory efficiently across a network at unprecedented high speeds. And yet it is all accomplished under the hood of Wombat’s mature MAMA API, presenting a set of familiar publish/subscribe semantics to developers.

“When we roled out Wombat Data Fabric, we decided to use the same API so application developers don’t have to worry about writing to a new interface. They don’t have to change anything with their trading applications or their EMS apps already on MAMA. You can deploy those apps aross a distributed fabric, or put them all on the same node and allow them to share messages at milions of messages per second in single digit microseconds. A year ago you couldn’t find a server that could handle these volumes, but now with 8, 16, and 32-core machines this is actually becoming possible.”

In the market data arms race, Barnes sees NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions and Intel converging in platform capabilities.

“We are trying to bring computers closer together through shared memory and remove as many of the layers as possible in between each application and the processor it runs on. That is happening on a large scale with co-location, and on a smal scale with the Wombat Data Fabric and its shared memory which streamlines IO, whether that be server to server or core to core.”