Under the agreement, BTS will make Informatica Ultra Messaging software the low-latency messaging backbone of its high-performance options trading platform.

BTS markets its platform as an outsourced solution to trading firms that require the ultimate in options trading speed and reliability, and want to avoid the time and expense of building and maintaining their own in-house trading systems.

BTS will embed Informatica Ultra Messaging into its trading solution to provide smaller options trading organizations with a single, reliable and near-instantaneous messaging platform.

The use of Informatica Ultra Messaging will help BTS create a high-frequency, algorithmic trading platform that can reliably handle millions of messages a second while supporting client implementations that can scale seamlessly from two to over 200 servers and from two to over 2,000 message recipients. This will allow BTS' customers to grow their trading businesses from dozens to hundreds of products.

Informatica Ultra Messaging provides BTS with sub-millisecond messaging across its trading platform, utilizing a "nothing in the middle" messaging architecture, which means BTS can increase the speed, reliability and scalability with which messages are delivered leading to trades being executed significantly faster.

Informatica also supports multiple transport protocols, including multi-cast and TCP, which enable network administrators to easily and dynamically select the best protocol for various messaging configurations. This flexibility will allow BTS' customers to leverage existing protocols, change protocols without redevelopment and attain maximum performance by selecting the best protocol for the given network architecture.

Embedding Informatica Ultra Messaging into its trading solution will enable BTS to:

• Achieve extremely low latency, below 100 microseconds, across its trading platform in support of high-volume, high-velocity trading. This will help smaller options trading firms to be more agile, scale their business, grow revenues and ensure the loyalty of their client base in dynamic and complex options trading markets.
• Scale over large message volumes and large numbers of message recipients without significantly increasing message latency. As a result, BTS' clients will be more easily able to grow their business cost-effectively, with no detriment to service quality.
• Help ensure peak messaging and trading performance--a key factor in providing a competitive and reliable options trading service.
• Eliminate single points of failure across its trading platform for high availability and robust service delivery.
• Retire a legacy custom-developed, broker-based solution for messaging that was challenged to reliably handle sizable volumes of large messages, difficult to scale and costly to maintain.

Looking ahead, BTS is investigating using Informatica Ultra Messaging Persistence Edition, which provides guaranteed messaging through an innovative Parallel Persistence architecture.

"Blue Trading Systems' aim is to provide its clients with the fastest, most reliable and most profitable platform for options trading. Informatica Ultra Messaging is a key element in our offering." explains Pedro Pinto, managing partner, Blue Trading Systems. "If we had all the time in the world to design the ideal messaging solution, it would probably look a lot like Informatica Ultra Messaging. As it is, Informatica has done that job for us, enabling us to embed in our platform a stable, configurable and high performance solution for message exchange that will help differentiate us competitively and make us more nimble in the market."

"Embedding Informatica Ultra Messaging will enable Blue Trading Systems to avoid the substantial risks of developing its own messaging backbone, and allow the company to focus on developing solutions specific to its clients," said Mark Mahowald, general manager, Ultra Messaging, Informatica. "Consequently, clients will receive the best of Blue Trading Systems' extensive know-how, while the company is able to take advantage of Informatica's similarly extensive expertise in the ultra messaging field."