For financial firms, providing first-class performance and exceptional reliability has always been a key aspiration, particularly as competition in the market intensifies. The combination of Rapid Addition and IBM's technology will offer clients improved performance benefits.

The integration of Cheetah, Rapid Addition's FIX engine, to WMQ LLM, will enable clients to access both optimum speeds all the way through the FIX messaging path and an accelerated return on investment. This tried and certified amalgamation of technologies has demonstrated its superior speed and resilience.

Using Rapid Addition's Binary FIX message format as the IBM WMQ LLM message payload allowed specific optimisation of The Cheetah FIX engine interface for transmitting and receiving messages over the IBM LLM message bus, it also minimizes latency. FIXML and ASCII FIX present other easy to implement message bus alternatives that still offer exceptional performance.

Gerry Reilly, Director, WebSphere Messaging Development and Customer Support at IBM said: "The combination of our Low Latency Messaging technology with Rapid Addition's Cheetah FIX engine provides our customers with a best of breed FIX solution for their trading systems. As a result, the enhanced performance will extend and optimise their trading capabilities, and therefore enhance their client's experience."

Kevin Houstoun, Chairman, Rapid Addition added: "We are always looking to build on our portfolio of technology partners and IBM is one of the biggest names to add to that. Our work with the firm will continue on into future projects, working together to continually improve overall performance of the joint offering and on other innovative services in the pipeline."