FIX is the global messaging standard for the electronic communication of trade-related messages between financial entities such as banks, broker-dealers, exchanges, and industry utilities.

BreakingPoint's testing platform creates a realistic network environment by combining a realistic blend of traditional, voice, video, financial and proprietary application traffic with live security strikes, all run at speeds 10 Gigabits per second and faster. The inclusion of the FIX protocol places BreakingPoint products in a unique position to reduce the time and costs associated with testing and tuning the performance and security of the network devices managing the world's financial systems.

Testing network devices that support high performance financial trading systems requires several of the unique capabilities of BreakingPoint products including:

• Generation of realistic application traffic from a library of 50+ application protocols, custom applications, and 3500+ security strikes at speeds of 10 Gigabits per second and faster provides an accurate testing environment that demonstrates actual network device performance and vulnerabilities.
• Testing with a realistic blend of application traffic at peak load is critical for tuning the performance of trading systems and identifying and resolving costly problems before they arise in latency-sensitive environments. In April of 2008, the TABB Group, a premier financial market research firm, estimated, "Up to 10 milliseconds of latency could result in a 10% drop in revenues." 
• Ability to be consistently and automatically updated with the latest in application protocols and security strikes so that every test is up-to- date with the most realistic data.
• A reduction in time-to-test by 50% brought about by a user-interface designed for ease-of-use, automated testing features and a library of pre- loaded application profiles that drastically simplifies the creation and modification of complex tests.
• A unified system that thoroughly tests the deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities of content-aware equipment for easily testing trading systems under peak market conditions

BreakingPoint CEO, Des Wilson, commented: "The ability for a financial services company to succeed often comes down to milliseconds of network performance. These organizations want to reap the benefits of new high performance content-aware network devices to enhance their customers' experience, while reducing the risks, necessitating the need to validate the performance and reliability of these network devices. BreakingPoint's easy-to-use products are uniquely designed to use realistic user traffic and network conditions, especially at Layers 4-7, allowing companies to confidently deploy next-generation network devices."