Leading the Belfast team are Conall McGleenan, development center manager; Conor Allen, product manager, Wombat’s universal feed handler; Tristan Bane, product manager, applications; and Kieran Northime, recently named business development manager, Europe. All report to Danny Moore, global head of sales, marketing and development who is based in Wombat’s New York sales office.

Wombat is a Nevada, US-based software company specializing in the development of high-performance, extremely low latency market data technology for brokers, market makers and hedge funds. Since its founding in 1999, Wombat has experienced strong growth by providing an off-the-shelf market data product line of feed handlers and the underlying framework as an alternative to software traditionally developed in-house in leading financial institutions.

2003 was the firm’s most successful year to date, winning 10 major new customers and experiencing considerable growth in all existing customer accounts, driven by the success of the company’s suite of more than 30 direct exchange feed handler products and its next-generation market data infrastructure software being introduced at the June 8 – 10 SIA Technology Management Conference in New York. With plans in 2005 to introduce more than 20 European exchange feed handlers by mid-year and leading Asia-Pacific exchanges before years’ end, it had become paramount for Wombat’s continuous growth to establish a development center to support Europe and the eastern half of the United States.

"This has been an incredible year for Wombat," Ron Verstappen, CEO and president of Wombat, said. "We have the fastest, best engineered, most scalable, flexible and extensible direct feed and market data middleware solutions on the market. We won enough new orders from new and existing accounts to fully cover operating costs for all of 2004 by end of the first week in January. While we’re not yet the largest company in terms of staff, we have a very strong core engineering team plus a reputation for delivering the best customer and technical support services in our industry."

Added Moore, "Moving from being a pure technology development group to a financial software firm, we needed to put considerable effort into finding highly educated, experienced, creative people of the right caliber, with the right talent, the right spirit and work ethic, then aggressively compensating them for their accomplishments. After considering India, Israel and others global technical centers, Belfast won hands down"

Conall McGleenan joins Wombat from Raytheon Systems Limited where he served as senior software engineer. From 1998 to 2000, he was a software engineer for TRW/Lucas Aerospace and from 1995 to 1996 a research assistant at Queens University of Belfast where he earned a B.Eng with 1st class honours in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D in computer science.

Conor Allen earned a B.Eng with honours in aeronautical engineering and an M.Sc in computer science and applications from Queens University and then spent seven years at Kainos Software Ltd. in Northern Ireland, the last four as project leader and technical architect.

Prior to joining Wombat, Tristan Bane was a technical architect at Kainos Software Ltd and before that a developer at B.I.C. Systems/Lution Ltd, both in Belfast. He earned a B.Sc degree in geology and an M.Sc in environmental sciences from Queens University.

Kieran Northime, a financial IT industry veteran who brings multi-cultural management experience from MISYS, MKI Risk, Paribas, Lehman Brothers, Fusion Software and Fexco, earned his Bachelors degree in electronic engineering from the University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

The new development center is located in the University area of South Belfast