29West, the market leader in high-performance, low-latency messaging solutions, today announced a new JMS (Java Message Service) API for their market leading, next-generation Ultra Messaging product family.
The product provides a market standard JMS API that leverages the low-latency, brokerless messaging design of 29West's Ultra Messaging with Queuing product (UMQ) to provide JMS performance with latencies in the sub-100 microsecond range, and throughput of over 1 million messages per second, on commodity hardware. The JMS API is an extension of 29West's recently released Zero Object Delivery (ZOD) Java API that minimizes latency spikes normally caused by the Java clean-up process known as "garbage collection."
29West is currently receiving feedback on the API from early adopter clients to determine which extended features should be available in the first version of the API, scheduled to be released later in Q2, according to Mark Mahowald, president and founder of 29West.
Mahowald says 29West already has several projects underway with major banks to migrate much of their equities trading technology to 29West Ultra Messaging. "These customers will benefit from an accelerated migration path without having to change the end applications," he said. Typical projects are in process in areas connected to high-frequency trading businesses within a firm where 29West is already established. One such example is a global order routing system built on JMS. Other projects will include risk-management applications like real-time position-keeping and pricing systems, as well as automated clearing and settlement projects to accelerate the move toward T+0 back-office processing.
"People have told us they want to take advantage of our brokerless design, but they have 200 or 300 applications they need to migrate, which is too time-consuming for them to take on," Mahowald says. "A good proportion of those systems are written in Java using a JMS API, so by offering a 29West JMS API, we can give clients a Java Archive (JAR) file compatible with the existing application." This enables clients to exchange messages with their trading applications -- typically written with 29West's C or .Net APIs -- without needing to recompile each application," Mahowald says.
"People want to move to next-generation infrastructures," he added. "They see that the sooner they can do that, the lower their end-to-end costs will be and the better they can keep up with the pace of innovation in the market."