The new Wombat platform serves financial markets firms contending with a fragmented market structure, rising market data and transaction volumes, increased low latency trading requirements and the forced migration from older Reuters (NasdaqNM: RTRSY) Triarch and TIBCO TIB market data distribution systems to Reuters RMDS.

"Our core vision is to deliver a single, independent, high-performance, market-data platform with a specific focus on the needs of electronic trading groups and application development groups, but also with broader applicability," said Ron Verstappen, president and CEO at Wombat. "This is a direct response to marketplace demand. The platform leverages our direct exchange feed handler products and APIs to provide a complete trading infrastructure rich in products and features we've developed in our work with leading electronic trading groups over the last five years."

"Contrary to some opinions, we're not primarily competing with Reuters or RMDS," added Danny Moore, COO. "We're directly serving firms competing in the automated trading space. Talk to them and you see the light go on. Because it's not overly difficult today to re-engineer 10 to 15-year old technology, we believe that RMDS and its predecessors, Triarch and ciServer, will still be capable of meeting certain industry requirements for the near term. But they're not meeting the needs of algorithmic trading, automated market-making, best-execution engines or the increased range of data services being offered in direct market access. Today, volumes are rising to nightmarish levels. Trading technology and consumption profiles are evolving rapidly. New thinking, new solutions, new latency levels and new technology are required and new now means Wombat."

Wombat now supports over 40 direct exchange feeds covering most of the equity, options and futures feeds in North America, including OPRA, NYSE, NASDAQ and ECNs, leading European exchange feeds and aggregated vendor feeds.

"A lot of firms are surprised by the breadth of coverage they gain through our direct feed handlers," added Verstappen. "Today's automated trading leaders already have direct connectivity to more exchanges than you might think. Our mission is to provide a single platform and data model with off-the-shelf feed handlers for every exchange globally."

The Wombat platform supports leading aggregated vendor feeds, including Comstock and Telekurs. "A Bloomberg Fat-Pipe feed handler may also be available soon," said Moore.

A series of high-performance components serve electronic trading and application development groups to support pricing, best execution, automated market making, basket-trading and various types of program, algorithmic and arbitrage-based electronic trading. Components include generic APIs, or building blocks: the MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API); PAPA (Platform Agnostic Publishing API); and MAMDA (Middleware Agnostic Market Data API). MAMA and PAPA provide abstraction layers over the underlying messaging middleware, making the ticker plant and application layer independent of the underlying middleware.

Wombat also supports a variety of middleware layers, including Mantara Elvin, TIBCO Rendezvous and the Wombat Transport layer based on Latency Busters Messaging(TM) software developed by 29West, a business partner. Some customers have also developed their own middleware adapters for custom environments.