Inside Market Data
www.insidemarketdata.com
September 10th 2007
Vol 22 No 49
DELIVERY TECHNOLOGIES
CohesiveFT Deploys AMQP for Data, Preps FAST
Chicago-based integration provider Cohesive Flexible Technologies is
working with broker-dealers and exchanges to implement the open-source
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) for routing streaming data
within their organizations and to third parties, without the need for
complicated middleware.
The vendor also plans to integrate the FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming
data) protocol into its offering later this year.
AMQP simplifies data streaming, ensuring it can be accomplished
without large teams of IT specialists and middleware software, says
Alexis Richardson, business development director in London. In
addition to market data, clients stream business data about positions,
trades, orders, faults, trade exceptions and breaks, he says. "Data
streaming is at the heart of most everything people do in the
markets—in 2007, almost everyone streams data all the time to everyone
else."
Founded in 2006, CohesiveFT has generated revenue to date by working
with customers in a consultative capacity. The vendor currently works
with two exchanges and several broker-dealers that are seeking to
leverage technology to lower the cost of message platform integration
in their market data distribution chain, says Dwight Koop, chief
operating officer in Chicago.
CohesiveFT began the transition to a software company with the beta
release of its Elastic Server On-Demand in July. "We see a lot of
demand from broker-dealers and exchanges for technology that makes it
easier to connect, trade and send data to and fro in a standard way,"
Richardson says.
AMQP delivers value-add on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)
network technologies by providing a smarter way of routing messages,
he says. The protocol enables data to be sent in the correct sequence
and ensures that any data requested for retransmission is also sent in
the correct sequence—processes which he says previously required users
to define complicated logic.
The Elastic Server uses version 0.8 of AMQP, which features a
publish-subscribe function that allows the protocol to be used for
streaming data, Richardson says. "AMQP manages smart routing,
publish-subscribe, data streaming, guaranteed delivery in sequence and
many more features… that otherwise you would have to custom-build
using middleware."
The Elastic Server allows clients to custom build application stacks
by downloading components from an online library and using
virtualization technology to create integrated applications, helping
them to configure middleware layers. "[Clients] don't need to know how
to set up a middleware system for messaging and then make it work with
a FIX server—normally an expensive integration project requiring
special skills to complete and then maintain," he says.
Richardson says CohesiveFT also plans to incorporate FAST into the
elastic server during the fourth quarter of 2007 alongside AMQP,
describing the two as complementary technologies because AMQP supports
long-running, multi-party connections, while FAST compresses data to
reduce bandwidth.
Multicast and More
Richardson predicts that in the future, AMQP will evolve to support
multicast, making it possible for users to send AMQP-format data over
a multicast connection, and over other data distribution technologies,
including TCP. "This is important because multicast is a fundamental
technology for streaming market data and other data," he says.
CohesiveFT participates in the AMQP working group, which is developing
technologies to enable multicast delivery of data. The working group's
other members include Credit Suisse, Red Hat, 29West and JP Morgan,
which pioneered the development of AMQP last year (Dealing with
Technology, Oct. 30, 2006).
The benefits of AMQP will be more fully realized as users adopt
version 5.0 of the FIX Protocol across their trading systems,
Richardson says, because FIX 5.0 introduces a new
transport-independent framework that gives clients more flexibility in
their choice of delivery protocols and makes it easier to use AMQP.
Elizabeth LeBras
Elizabeth LeBras, US Reporter
Inside Market Data
Incisive Media
270 Lafayette Street, Suite 700
New York, NY 10012
+1 212 634 4809
http://www.insidemarketdata.com
|
