Wombat Financial Software announced today that it has expanded its suite of direct exchange feed handlers that support the Reuters (LSE: RTR) Market Data Systems (RMDS) to 30, extending coverage beyond North America to leading European exchanges, including Euronext, Copenhagen, Oslo, Milan and Vienna. Pacific-basin coverage will be added in 2005.
The Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) joins components from Reuters Triarch and TIBCO Software's (NASDAQ:TIBX) TIB Market Data Distribution System platforms to manage financial content in real-time with a high degree of scalability and resilience across trading environments.
During the next two years, up to 1,000 financial firms are expected to migrate nearly 80,000 applications from existing Triarch and TIB platforms to RMDS.
According to Danny Moore, global head of sales and marketing at Wombat, "Our suite of feed handlers enables any of these firms to harness the power of direct exchange feeds within their Reuters architecture. From the beginning, our product development strategy has been to allow customers to keep their options open, which is why we will continue to support direct exchange feed handlers across all legacy platforms, including TIB ciServer and Triarch as well as RMDS."
Changes in trading strategies and technology spawned by decimalization, falling transaction charges, ECNs, market and liquidity fragmentation are forcing firms to incorporate direct feed data onto their market data services to drive down latency and remain competitive. Conversely, the same changes combined with the emergence of low-latency technology, are now driving up data volumes.
"By 2006, volumes are forecast to rise by up to 500%," said Ron Verstappen, president and CEO at Wombat. "With this explosion in volume, what's become known as the 'market data tsunami,' we could see peak message rates rising to somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 records per second."
"To prepare for these volumes, we began building the MDRV market data distribution platform three years ago," said Verstappen. "Based on TIBCO's TIB/Rendezvous product, MDRV today delivers data with a latency of less than 1 millisecond in production. Its order book and data quality functionality is best of breed," explained Verstappen, adding, "However, Wombat has always fully supported all of the leading Reuters platforms. In fact, our first feed handlers were developed to work with the TIB Classic/ciServer platform." Today, 50% of the firm’s customers use Wombat feed handlers to push direct feed data onto Triarch, ciServer and RMDS.
"It's not clear whether the aggregated vendors have an answer to the latency problem, let alone rocketing volumes," cautioned Moore. "Over the last 18 months, an increasing number of firms have taken control back into their own hands by deploying direct feed-based infrastructures. Wombat's feed-handlers give any RMDS customer the option of going direct to the exchange to access low-latency data, while hedging against the potential devastation of the data tsunami."