The new Wombat feed handlers will provide direct access to foreign-exchange data from EBS, the leading provider of FX trading systems; the first real-time municipal bonds feed from the municipal bonds authority, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB); the Chicago Board of Trade (eCBOT); and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE Alerts).

The EBS feed handlers strengthen Wombat's foreign exchange offering, adding to three previously released feed handlers: Currenex FX; HotSpot FX; and Barclays FX. EBS is the leading broker of interbank spot FX transactions, trading in excess of $110 billion per day.

"We're responding quickly to recent feed offerings, in one case, moving lock step with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board by releasing its first feed handler for municipal bonds for the first-of-its-kind, real-time municipal-bonds feed," said Danny Moore, Wombat's COO. Previously, the MSRB published its price information the day after a trade was transacted.

"Many industry people continue to associate direct exchange feeds with the high volume exchanges, like OPRA and the ECNs," added Moore. "However, in other cases the use of direct feeds brings speed to market, rather than waiting for the data to be available from the consolidators. We've recently delivered a number of feed handlers for a number of low volume specialist feeds, including alerts feeds such as NYSE Alerts, various leading FX data sources and now MSRB. Our development model focuses on the ability to deliver new products with very short lead times, often within two to four weeks of a new feed being available. In many cases, the fast delivery of production-ready software brings as much of a fast time-to-market competitive advantage to our customers as the speed of the feed handlers themselves."

The five new feed handlers are available on all common market data platforms, including Reuters RMDS, TIB Classic, Triarch, Wombat's various MAMA platforms (TIB/RV, Elvin and LBM) and various custom interfaces. The handlers are designed to operate in high-availability mode with built-in, active-active, hot-standby fault tolerance and entitlements.

Wombat's direct exchange feed handler coverage in 2004 was extended to include major European exchanges. During 2005, leading Pacific Basin exchanges will be added.