TipOff is a real time middleware analysis and passive latency monitoring appliance which is gaining traction with financial institutions that are pushing the performance envelope of real-time financial middleware products such as TIBCO Rendezvous, Reuters RMDS, Wombat, 29West LBM and Real-Time Innovations DDS, particularly when integrated with direct exchange feeds.

TipOff will be deployed by a German bank across all five of its regional investment banking centres, providing passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feeds and real time middleware analysis of its Wombat and RMDS platforms. TipOff is also to be deployed by a major US financial institution to perform real time analysis, monitoring and trouble shooting of its TIBCO Rendezvous infrastructures globally.

Henry Young, TS-Associates' Director of Product Development, says, "Having gone through a tough six month evaluation process in the US, which we supported remotely from London, it's good news that one of the world's top investment banks has confirmed that TipOff is the leading product in this space".

TS-Associates specialises in the operational analysis and monitoring of real time middleware infrastructures. Developed through close partnerships with its customers, TipOff provides unique capabilities in areas such as middleware operational analysis, passive latency monitoring, application behaviour validation, infrastructure utilisation chargeback and capacity planning. TipOff supports an ever increasing spectrum of market data and transaction middleware products and standards.

TipOff is a unique product, based on TS-Associates' nine years of experience in building data capture and analysis solutions for real time middleware stacks. Delivered as an appliance solution, TipOff incorporates specialist hardware for packet capture, high resolution time stamping and FPGA accelerated processing, guaranteeing zero packet loss on 1GE, 10GE and Infiniband networks, and enabling the analysis in real time of over one million messages per second. TipOff is in production with leading US and European financial institutions.

Steve Rodgers, TS-Associates' CTO, says, "TipOff is a unique product that brings together all our accumulated experience in building data capture and analysis solutions for real time middleware stacks. The advent of FPGA-accelerated capture cards, ASIC-accelerated data processing cards and high-performance 64-bit multi-core processors has enabled us to capture, decode and analyse all messaging traffic across multiple middleware stacks concurrently and at rates which are in excess of our customers' most demanding requirements. This is a first for any product".

TipOff decodes middleware protocols from the wire, with no reliance on middleware vendor APIs or daemon processes. A vitally important design aim in TipOff is that in order to monitor and analyse the operation of a middleware environment, there should be no dependency on any component of that middleware product. Furthermore, as an appliance product using hardware accelerated capture technology that absolutely guarantees zero packet loss, TipOff is not exposed to data loss as experienced by regular server grade network interfaces, and is thus able to yield a complete forensic analysis of network events such as multicast storms or microbursts.

Henry Young says, "We know of no other product that shares our key enabling capabilities of guaranteed capture coupled with vendor dissociated decode. Add to that our multi-dimensional messaging analysis and passive latency monitoring functionality and we believe that we have a uniquely powerful product on our hands."

TS-Associates is currently engaged with a number of customers, extending its existing coverage of North American, European and Asian direct exchange feeds, to position TipOff as the universal, multi-platform, cross market, passive latency monitoring solution of choice