This latest release, the eleventh iteration since it was launched in 2004, enables current ACTIV API users to leverage their choice of best-of-breed tools to maximize trading capabilities, provide fastest possible response times and simplify coding to drive competitive edge.

Systemic latency goes beyond the market data infrastructure, making application integration critical to address end-to-end latency requirements of trading architectures. By providing direct access to the full repository of ACTIV's latency-optimized solutions, ACTIV API users can leverage the company's high-performance aggregation, middleware and distribution technologies, including ACTIV's hardware-accelerated solution MPU, to streamline workflow, improve throughput and dramatically reduce systemic latency.

Since it was first released, ACTIV has continuously updated its API to ensure that users have the greatest flexibility and functionality to combine industry solutions and native developments without adding milliseconds. The consistent and reliable platform supports real-time content changes with no recoding requirement, providing end users with the flexible market data infrastructure they need to power lowest latency trading systems.

Driven by performance, functionality and ease of use, the ACTIV API is already used in more than 50 different ISV products, including algorithmic trading engines, tick store databases, complex event processing (CEP) platforms and more, as well as several thousand unique end-user GUI and trading applications at more than 300 firms around the globe.

"Most people recognize ACTIV as a low-latency market data aggregator, but the ACTIV platform is also an enterprise-class distribution platform with rich client API functionality and a fully compliant exchange entitlement and reporting system," said Mike Dunne, CTO at ACTIV Financial. "The ACTIV platform is increasingly becoming the market data backbone at some of the world's largest fi financial firms, and ISVs realize that supporting the ACTIV API is a must-have feature for their applications."

Using the enhanced API, ACTIV customers receive only the data they need for their applications, allowing client CPUs to perform less work and further reduce latency and data processing costs throughout the entire trading course.

Features of the new API include:

• Shared-memory access to the ACTIV platform running on the same machine rather than requiring a network connection
• Support for the latest Microsoft, Oracle/Sun Microsystems and GCC compilers (part of the GNU/Linux operating system project) furthering access and flexibility for developers and users alike
• Support for all 10 existing API releases

These enhancements are in addition to the existing API functionalities:

• C++, pure Java and pure C# and under Mono 2.0
• Comprehensive operating system interoperability for C++, 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and MAC OS X
• Wide-ranging CPU support, including x86, x64, SPARC family and Itanium family
• Powerful request model that minimizes roundtrips to the server for fastest possible response times and simplified coding
• Access to ACTIV's enterprise-class messaging platform with rich client API functionality
• Support for all manner of required response queries and subscription models
• Access to the middleware infrastructure tier within a full security master construct to access news database; historical calls-to-time; sales and daily price histories; and company fundamental, reference and corporate actions databases