FSMLabs, the premier provider of enterprise real-time and timekeeping technology, today announced availability of TimeKeeper, a software product for financial services and other critical applications.
FSMLabs TimeKeeper helps capital markets and other regulated industries deploy critical applications across clusters, among data centers and over wide-area networks, while meeting requirements for accurate time-stamping and data logging for high-frequency and low-latency trading, market data streams and other transactions. TimeKeeper's precision timekeeping, accurate to 10 microseconds or less, adds credibility to trade communications among inter-parties and forms a solid foundation for latency measurement.
FSMLabs TimeKeeper assists hedge funds, broker-dealers, proprietary trading firms, banks and other financial institutions to meet the challenges presented by today's marketplace: surging network traffic, increasing prevalence of high-frequency trading, and pressure to reduce data latency and transaction times to sub-millisecond levels. TimeKeeper supports mission-critical activities, such as latency arbitrage strategies and management of fragmented liquidity environments, enabling granular timestamping to track delivery speed of trade data and response time across execution venues.
"High-speed, fragmented markets and cross-asset trading have together focused the spotlight on latency," says Bob Giffords, an independent banking and technology analyst based in the UK. "Successful low-latency operations demand an ability to synchronize clocks across server clusters in proximity trading hubs. FSMLabs TimeKeeper appears to have significantly raised the bar, increasing confidence in cross-server software metrics in the low microsecond range. Anyone who is serious about high frequency trading should take note."
TimeKeeper also helps respond to ever more stringent transaction tracking requirements from regulatory bodies. Failure to conform to reporting requirements from FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), SEC Regulation NMS, European Union MiFID and other regulatory mandates can result in US$1 million or greater fines and impact crecredibility and institutional trust.
"Synchronize Your Watches" with FSMLabs TimeKeeper
With current timekeeping technology, such as NTP (Network Time Protocol), time servers, blade clocks and application clocks can lose synchronization with reference time, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) time sources. As system clocks lurch erratically to recover, delays and uncertainty are introduced into timestamping of system events. In contrast, FSMLabs TimeKeeper converges with reference time within seconds after system start-up or interruption, serving stable and accurate time to downstream servers and applications.
"Traders, fund managers, bankers and the IT departments that support them often don't realize the extent of timekeeping inaccuracies in their computer systems and networks," notes Victor Yodaiken, FSMLabs president and CEO. "With accumulated timekeeping errors that can stretch from milliseconds to seconds and beyond, the integrity of latency measurements, transaction reporting and auditing logs are compromised."
FSM Labs TimeKeeper is an end-to-end, pure software solution that requires no dedicated hardware and exerts virtually no demand on processing resources. Already deployed at multiple financial services companies, the TimeKeeper client-server architecture supports all types of systems that today use NTP.
Availability
TimeKeeper is available today and is optimized for blade servers running Red Hat Linux (RHEL 5.x) with GPS time sources. TimeKeeper can also be bundled with hardware blade servers as a timekeeping appliance. FSMLabs plans to augment TimeKeeper with support for PTP (Precision Time Protocol) later in 2010. Contact FSMLabs for PTP roadmap information.