The solution, which has been developed in conjunction with a number of the firm's key Tier 1 customers over the past six months, is designed to control the volume of data published to downstream trading applications.

Today's market data volume increases and, more specifically, the surge in quote volumes places excessive pressure on downstream applications. This pressure not only decreases the timeliness and completeness of the market data received by the applications but also is causing more and more chronic application instability. To remain competitive, market participants require reliable, consistent, low latency market data delivery, at rates that can be readily consumed by their trading systems.

Wombat Traffic Control provides clients with the ability to perform real-time conflation at the feed handler level thereby protecting their underlying market data platform and applications. It offers clients the advantage of eliminating intra-day spikes which are consistently exceeding available headroom on end applications.

Traditional measures to control data volumes typically involve bolstering the market data infrastructure with hardware investments which subsequently result in additional software license fees. These costs are nullified with the adoption of Wombat Traffic Control since conflation is performed at the entry point to the market data system, that is, at the feed handler layer.

The Wombat Traffic Control solution consists of a set of CPU-efficient conflation plug-ins that can be readily deployed with any of Wombat's suite of over 150 direct exchange and aggregated vendor feed handlers, including Comstock's CTF, Reuters' RDF and Bloomberg's BPipe. With Wombat Traffic Control, conflation strategies can be configured to suit the use patterns of the downstream applications. Clients may wish to conflate only quote messages or conflate quote and trade messages, they may decide to set different conflation intervals depending on the message rate o or content of specific feeds.

Wombat customers can further benefit from Wombat Traffic Control by using the Wombat Acumen Performance Monitoring solution, which serves to automatically activate conflation. Activation can be configured based on any key feed handler performance metric, such as incoming message rates or CPU usage. This enables different service levels to be implemented dynamically, for example, start conflating at 100ms interval if message rates exceed 2k msgs/sec; increase the conflation interval to 500ms if message rates exceed 4k msgs/sec. Wombat Traffic Control also allows for scheduled conflation, for instance only conflate during market open, start conflating at 09:30, stop conflating at 10:00.

"Managing market data volume increases has been an ongoing battle for the capital markets and trends show that this challenge is set to intensify," said Danny Moore, Wombat CEO. "We've partnered with the industry to create Wombat Traffic Control; an immediate, drop-in solution for firms [using aggregated feeds as well as direct exchange feeds] that is not only highly performant but also cost effective."