The vast majority of trading in today's financial markets is done electronically - increasingly done by high-performance trading algorithms. Speed is a key determinant of success in these hyper-competitive markets. According to an industry expert, a millisecond of latency in trading can be worth $100 million a year to a major brokerage firm. TIBCO FTL is designed to address these needs, with an average application latency in test conditions of 384 nanoseconds for intra-host communication and 3.1 microseconds for inter-host communication - surpassing the lowest reported latency claims of competitors by 42 percent.[1]

Previewed in May 2010 as the first messaging middleware solution to break the microsecond barrier in end-to-end application latency, TIBCO FTL is optimized to leverage the latest advancements like multi-core processors, in-memory architectures and networking technologies like Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. TIBCO FTL is the outcome of a strategic engineering collaboration between TIBCO and Intel to engineer high-performance middleware using next generation technology like Westmere micro-architectures and Intel® QuickPath.

Key Highlights
• Content-based addressing which enables applications to receive only the relevant information from a stream of millions of messages and radically simplifies management by avoiding complicated subject hierarchies
• Full support for Self Describing Data that frees application developers from the burden of parsing binary data streams and managing metadata at the individual application level
• Pluggable transports that provide the flexibility to leverage advancements in underlying networking and platform technologies without having to rewrite application code
• TIBCO FTL offers four transports to choose from - Shared Memory, RDMA (InfiniBand and 10GigE), TCP, and Reliable Multicast
• Powerful out-of-band metadata management that enables administrators to centrally define message formats rally defiats rally define message formats and data distribution paths without impacting applications
• Native integration with TIBCO Rendezvous® for seamless integration with existing IT infrastructure
• Powerful APIs in C, Java and .NET to enable rapid development of high performance applications

"Markets have an insatiable need for speed. Low Latency Messaging technology is critical to any firm's strategy to dominate today's extreme-high-speed trading floors," said Roy Schulte, Distinguished Analyst and Vice President, Gartner. "Firms compete head-to-head on speed of execution, message volumes are exploding and integration needs are getting more and more complex. Firms are looking at messaging solutions to provide the lowest possible latency to beat the competition - but also to provide key capabilities so that they are agile enough to sustain that advantage."

"Multi-core server solutions from Intel give customers the ability to run entire trading systems on a single machine for extreme performance and improved manageability," said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President and General Manager of the Intel Data Center Group. "TIBCO's new messaging technology is optimized for both intra-host and inter-host messaging, something that is critical in leading these paradigm shifts in computing. As companies move more of their processing to multi-core machines, TIBCO FTL software running on Intel® Xeon® platforms will deliver an order of magnitude speed increase in areas where every microsecond - no every nanosecond! - counts. We're excited at the results of this engineering collaboration with TIBCO. We have created technology that is revolutionizing high performance messaging capabilities."

"In stark contrast to extreme minimalist, nothing-in-the-middle design approaches promoted by other low latency messaging vendors, TIBCO has chosen to design from ground-up to deliver the fastest possible performance without compromising on messaging middleware features like Self Describing Data, Centralized Metadata Management and Content Based Addressing," said Rourke McNamara, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, TIBCO.