Catena Technologies will provide consultancy services that leverage TS-Associates' TipOff appliance and Application Tap time-stamping cards.

"We see a clear opportunity to improve the visibility that banks, brokers, and exchanges have into their internal latencies, as well as the latency information that they provide to their customers," said Randall E. Duran, Catena Technologies' CEO. "TipOff and Application Tap enable us to capture and analyze latency events across systems to a hitherto unavailable level of accuracy, and so help our customers minimize the variability of market data and order processing delays."

TipOff is a real-time middleware analysis and monitoring appliance that passively monitors and correlates messages from multiple systems to determine latency. The Application Tap is a PCI Express card that enables the latency dynamics of real-time applications to be measured with high precision while having minimal impact on their performance. To date, Catena Technologies has used TS-Associates' products for a number of high-performance benchmarking exercises and to monitor a low-latency messaging platform at a multinational bank.

"Catena Technologies' Asia-Pacific focus is ideal for providing services around latency monitoring using TS-Associates' products. We have found that the type of expertise Catena offers is difficult to find outside the major trading centers of London and New York," said Henry Young, TS-Associates' CEO. "As latency sensitive trading strategies are becoming more prevalent in Asia, it will be critical for firms to leverage the best tools and skills to ensure that their systems are achieving top performance."

Latency management is critical to many trading strategies, where a delay of a few microseconds can make the difference between a profitable and unprofitable trade.