Traditionally, trading firms and exchanges have been faced with a choice between a typical "ticker plant" solution, to meet their need for increased speed and the ability to handle ever greater message volumes, or a full-featured data management system that enables data validation and enrichment, as well as control over data packaging and distribution.

The market is seeking solutions that meet the competing requirements of speed and functionality. There are many drivers for this, including the need to support trading applications in an environment of increasing volumes and demand for speed, the ability to provide value-added data for sophisticated analysis, the need to reduce operating costs, and the breakdown of silos between traditional "market data" and "reference data" management.

The new generation of Composer has been designed for these critical challenges. The new release is fully scalable and provides transport of up to 500,000 messages per second with as low as one millisecond of internal latency, while retaining full functionality.

This new level of low latency performance is achieved through an advanced distributed architecture design and its ability to fully utilize the latest hardware technology. The sophisticated design allows Composer to provide high-volume throughput with extremely low latency, while retaining its existing full functionality, including entitlements-based distribution, data validation and enhancement capabilities.

As with all market data technology solutions, latency and throughput are dependent on hardware and software configuration. In extensive testing, Cicada has demonstrated best performance on a Linux platform; however, Composer is multi-platform compatible and continues to provide superior performance on Sun and IBM platforms.

"Composer was designed with scalability in mind," said Richard Leung, Cicada CTO. "Our new performance expectations were confirmed through benchmarking the latest release of Composer, in which we implemented performance-related changes on the latest CPU technology. The performance that Composer achieves, both in terms of message throughput and end-to-end latency, makes it a cost-effective data management solution for all sizes of enterprises. We are proud that Composer can achieve significantly improved performance without sacrificing any key design benefits, such as high availability, that make Composer a mission-critical financial market data platform."