The trading environment is characterized by an unrelenting drive for speed. Regulation and competition increasingly require investment firms to develop sophisticated trading automation facilities that meet the needs of low-cost, best price execution. Utilizing Sun's JavaSpaces technology, GigaSpaces enables these firms to rapidly bring to market ultra-fast applications that can easily scale as data and transaction processing volumes grow, while running on cost-effective hardware and operating systems, such as the Sun Fire SPARC and x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS).

"Sun appreciates that customers are looking for a whole solution to any given business problem, not just technology. GigaSpaces provides the middleware component that allows trading firms to fully realize the benefits of Sun's low-latency hardware systems," said Donna Rubin, senior director, worldwide financial services, Sun Microsystems. "With GigaSpaces running on top of Sun's systems, developers can focus on their company's unique business logic and competitive advantage, while the GigaSpaces software handles the distribution of data and processing across the underlying infrastructure."

Next Generation Trading (NGT) is a key initiative for Sun's financial services segment. Sun recognizes that a combination of factors have coincided to create a unique opportunity for a Next Generation Trading systems. NGT is a cooperative activity by Sun and leading ISVs from the major financial markets around the world.

"The trading environment in capital markets is changing rapidly," said Geva Perry, executive vice president, business development at GigaSpaces. "Sun has taken a leadership role with the understanding that firms need a solution "stack" that can handle today's performance and scalability needs across the entire infrastructure - from computational systems to trader desks. We are excited about contributing a critical element to this stack with our "Write Once, Scale Anywhere" approach."

GigaSpaces Enterprise and Caching Editions have been independently and consistently benchmarked in the most demanding distributed environments, encompassing more than 2000 commodity, hyper-threaded CPUs while loading more than 2 terabyte of data in 20 minutes and processing 800 million trading events in less than 100 minutes.