According to Mark Mahowald, president at 29West, a leading Chicago-based developer of high-speed, messaging-software solutions, 29West signed a licensing and development agreement with Wombat Financial Software to provide the messaging software for Wombat's next-generation market-data platform. Said Mahowald, "Wombat saw the need for a new approach to messaging that took advantage of advances in network design as well as hardware capabilities to provide the next jump in performance and scalability needed to meet the market data messaging needs. They wanted a messaging layer that was a clear step ahead of the current commercial messaging solutions for high-speed, market-data delivery."

The team at 29West led the design and development of the first Triarch financial market trading floors, the commercial implementations of the PGM reliable multicast protocol for Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and commercialization and support of the Lucent (NYSE: LU)-designed RMTP II reliable multicasting protocol. Having designed, delivered and supported in demanding production environments, high-speed messaging solutions that use broadcast/multicast data delivery (Triarch), tree-based approaches (RMTP II), satellite and WAN (PGM) as well as working closely on server-messaging solutions like SmartSockets from TIBCO Software (Nasdaq: TIBX) and Java Messaging Service (JMS), they had strong views on where improvements could be made.

"We felt there was a way to combine the routing and large subscriber/small subscriber benefits of a server-based approach with the efficiency and scalability of a multicast/broadcast daemon-based solution and provide the market with a messaging layer that took a real leap beyond what was on the market today," said Todd Montgomery, principal software architect at 29West.

Knowing what works and what does not, 29West set out to design the next-generation of high-speed messaging solutions. Said Mahowald, "Our vision for the future matched perfectly with Wombat's's ideas, which allowed us to quickly strike a partnership to deliver this messaging layer for them. We feel the combination of Wombat's state-of-the-art feed handlers and application expertise, combined with our messaging layer will allow Wombat to provide the fastest market-data delivery solution in the industry." In the partnership relationship with Wombat, 29West is delivering the messaging layer and working closely with Wombat on features and performance goals.

Wombat will be offering the messaging layer only as an integrated part of its broader market data solutions. The 29West messaging layer uses a flat architecture which fits Wombat's goal for the highest performance and flexibility.

"This architecture not only makes the solution exceedingly fast and simple to use, it also eliminates the need for extra copies of the data, bringing significant increases in throughput and makes the overall solution very CPU-efficient," said Ron Verstappen, president and CEO at Wombat Financial Software.

29West is licensing the messaging layer as a standalone product to all interested parties in the financial data markets as well as the broader commercial messaging market. By offering full source code and a willingness to provide extensions and customization as desired, 29West's strategy is meet the needs of a growing array of sophisticated large users who cannot gain what they need from existing solutions available in the market today.

According to Mahowald, "It is not that the existing solutions are slow. Several function very well, and some of the ideas we pioneered 18 years ago in developing the first Triarch systems are still the cornerstones of many large financial data distribution systems today. But the market is changing. Today there are a set of applications that want to take advantage of streaming data, transparently run at high speeds over WANs and other complex network topologies, have absolutely the highest performance requirements or simply need to provide more user control and flexibility in the way the data is delivered. Before the 29West messaging layer, users were being forced to develop their own solution. We feel we can offer them a better option."

29West is currently targeting OEM customers as well as large end users for its messaging software. Early code is being offered to partners today, with a general commercial release planned for October 2004.