Direct Edge has experienced explosive growth in the last year, boosting its matched market share of U.S. equity trades from just under 5% in October 2008 to over 12.5% currently. In so doing, Direct Edge has grown to be the third largest stock market in the country, behind only the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. In order to deal with this level of growth a more efficient messaging system was required, and Direct Edge determined that 29West's Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise (UME) was the only solution capable of delivering the required levels of performance, scalability and reliability.

Direct Edge is using UME to integrate applications spanning the entire exchange, from its front-end gateways through its matching engines to back-end compliance systems. With 29West's UME serving as the messaging backbone for the exchange, Direct Edge has realized a dramatic reduction in overall system latency, and increased throughput, and resiliency, all while reducing its infrastructure footprint by greater than 50%. The firm says this has resulted in substantial savings on development, datacenter and support costs.

"The flexibility to use TCP and Reliable Multicast, with the option of streaming and persistence in different portions of the overall exchange architecture is ideal", says John Ryan, Chief Architect, Direct Edge.

"This allowed us to implement key designs to achieve low latency order flow processing, even during times of high-volume, volatile trading. We can leverage UME's breadth of features under a single API to deploy new capabilities and respond much more rapidly to changing business and regulatory requirements."

"We're excited to be working with Direct Edge to support their highly innovative business model," says Mark Mahowald, founder and president of 29West. "Our ultra low-latency messaging enables Direct Edge's dark pool and US equities and options exchanges to continually increase their speed advantage in the market, in in turn giving their customers the edge they're looking for."