The successful relationship between one of the largest German online brokers and Interactive Data Managed Solutions, which began 10 years ago, has now been further strengthened.

"Our relationship with Interactive Data Managed Solutions has been influenced by a lot of pioneering spirit since its start 10 years ago, and we have had great results ever since," said Helge Fobbe, Head of Web Management at Comdirect bank AG. "Throughout our relationship, we have been able to develop a very successful Internet presence which is used both by private investors and professional users. Since the early days, we have valued Interactive Data Managed Solutions as a good, reliable partner for market data and software."

During the course of the new project, the market data component of the comdirect bank AG web site will be migrated to the Market Data Gateway, Interactive Data's open market data platform, and the site's architecture will be upgraded and modernised. Via the Market Data Gateway, comdirect receives market data from various providers, available in real-time or delayed, as well as HTML- and Java-based analytical tools and trading applications. The platform's flexibility helps support the integration of the comdirect and Interactive Data systems. In addition, new interfaces for connecting to the Market Data Gateway have been developed especially for comdirect in order to seamlessly integrate the bank's IT architecture. As a result, comdirect is able to use both Interactive Data's and its own applications for the first time. A further advantage of the new architecture is the maximum scalability of the web site.

During the last 10 years, investors have been able to gain a comprehensive overview of the global markets via comdirect's web site. Moving forward, the Market Data Gateway will play an important role as it delivers data for charts, rankings or indices to the bank. The broad range of information includes market data available on comdirect.de, such as detaiils of more than 9,000 funds licensed in Germany and over 200,000 derivatives.

Data delivered by various content providers is harmonised by the Market Data Gateway into a consistent semantical data model and that is designed to be easier to analyse. At the core of the open technology is the 'object server', which is engineered to deliver data via Java, XML, .NET, TCL- or PHP interfaces to customised applications. With this technology, information from various asset classes can be combined and delivered in real-time to authorised users.

"Comdirect bank AG has been our customer for many years. Together we have been able to set new standards in the field of web sites for online brokerage", said Stephan Wolf, managing director, Interactive Data Managed Solutions. "This is why we are very excited to have signed up to this new project, which also re-emphasises the trust that comdirect has in us and in our technology."