Wombat Financial Software, the direct exchange connectivity experts, provided a significant endorsement of the new FIX Adapted for Streaming (FAST) protocol today by announcing the release of a new FAST feed handler for the Archipelago Exchange's ARCABook Binary feed.
FAST is a new market data protocol and compression standard designed to streamline market data transmission.
"FAST has exceeded our expectations, and those of our early adoption customer, in terms of reducing customer bandwidth costs and increasing data speed," commented Brendan Duffy, VP of engineering at Wombat. "Wombat's commitment to embracing industry standards, and to latency and total customer cost reduction, means a constant process of seeking out efficiencies across the data delivery chain and re-engineering our systems to exploit them. Adopting FAST is a prime example of that, and we look forward to offering further implementations as more customers demand it and providers deploy it."
Wombat's Feed Handler for ARCABook compliments Wombat's existing ARCA Binary feed handler and the many others Wombat provides for data feeds from exchanges, ECNs, alternative trading systems, brokers and consolidated vendor feeds. Trading operations have increasingly turned to Wombat for connectivity to full orderbook data from markets like ARCA, INET and Nasdaq through an integrated platform with minimal latency. Wombat also offers a suite of add-on components to enrich that data, such as the Wombat SuperBook virtual orderbook aggregation server.
"The FAST protocol's ability to compress and accelerate data transmission has been receiving a great deal of attention in the capital markets, and we're starting to see real take-up in the financial community" commented Rich Shriver, Co-Chair of the FPL Market Data Optimization Working Group. "Archipelago and the other sponsors of the FPL FAST Proof of Concept recognized the significant business value and we anticipate a radical change in market data and electronic trading technology as vendors such as Wombat develop new products based on the FAST protocol."