WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets is unique in that it offers data vendor independence, because the software is "content neutral" and can accept feeds from virtually any provider. Supported feeds include major U.S. and international data sources, and leading consolidated feeds such as Bloomberg B-Pipe on Demand (BPOD) and IDC PlusFeed. It also includes high speed multicast and scalable point-to-point (unicast) messaging capabilities to enable market data delivery to local and/or remote office clients. The system can also simultaneously offer varying quality of service distribution options, including callout latency of 20 microseconds and end-to-end latency of 150 microseconds for a typical market data feed.

"Financial firms not only need to be able to cost effectively process millions of messages per second from an increasing number of feeds in microseconds, but also need to integrate this market data seamlessly with multiple front-, middle- and back-office applications," said Guy Tagliavia, Director of WebSphere Front Office and Low Latency Messaging for IBM Software Group. "WebSphere Front Office allows our clients to process the enormous amount of data available and use a shared infrastructure across all business units and applications."

IBM clients such as Fifth Third Bank are already realizing the benefits that WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets provides.

"We are saving a percentage (one to two basis points) on each new deal by taking advantage of the real-time mark-to-market pricing comparisons offered by WebSphere Front Office and reducing the dealer spread," said Cara Jonas, project manager at Fifth Third Bank.

WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets includes:

• Dozens of feed handlers supporting more than 70 data feeds including major US and International data sources.
  
• Consolidated order book functionality.
  
• High-speed multicast and point-to-point messaging support.

The new features included in version 3 are:

• Thirteen new feed handlers addressing North American and European markets.
  
• Platform enhancements, including a remote caching server to help support distribute deployment environments.
  
• Significant performance improvements including a greater than 40 percent latency improvement and a 90 percent throughput improvement on OPRA over previous versions.
  
• Consolidated order book enhancements for expanded horizontal scalability.

Leveraging a low-latency platform for managing real-time market data directly from exchanges, brokers and vendors speeds and simplifies transaction processing, while giving all participants a better view of how these transactions impact one another. Besides WebSphere for Front Office for Financial Markets, other IBM technology supporting this includes products from the acquisition of InfoDyne. Together, these products deliver extensive feed handler capabilities, a robust market data platform, and a rich messaging and middleware portfolio.