"Orc Software is taking a leading role in providing global customers with FAST encoded FIX," says Orc's Chief Technology Officer, John Cameron. "CameronFAST will be highly valued by firms looking to get ahead in the latency and bandwidth race. Potential users include exchanges, market data providers and algorithmic trading applications, where reliable compression of high volume market data, for distribution or consumption, is paramount."

"Smaller transaction messages and faster execution will drastically lower their costs for exchanging market data. The very high performance-enabling FAST Protocol has already proven to be a highly efficient solution for spiraling market data volumes, and is being adopted by the world's leading exchanges."

FAST was developed by the FIX Protocol Limited organization to bring the benefits of standardization to market data and deliver optimized performance for the exchange of electronic financial information. Built around a data compression algorithm, when it is correctly implemented, it significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and latency between sender and receiver. FAST works particularly well at improving performance during periods of peak message rates.

CameronFAST follows the proven CameronFIX technology. It is an open architecture framework enabling ease of integration with other applications. It is delivered with useful sample FAST applications built using the framework. These are the FASTEncoder, FASTDecoder and FIXFASTProxy. CameronFAST works equally well with any FIX or non-FIX application.

Existing Orc solutions such as Orc Trader, Orc Liquidator, CameronFIX Universal Server and CameronFIX Market Data Server, will be CameronFAST-enabled by deeply integrating it within their core architecture. All Orc applications will be internally optimized for FAST and this will be available as an option for customers during Q4.

CameronFAST is 100% FAST 1.1 compliant and includes full XML template support.