Source: Deepstream
Cloud computing has completely changed the world over the last 10 years. Few would have believed that just by spreading data across multiple computers, even the smallest companies could operate world wide services at a fraction of the original cost.
But with this new distributed structure came new challenges - and while companies, from mobile game makers to ride sharing services quickly started utilizing the cloud, the financial world struggled to adapt their powerful, yet monolithic technologies to the new, decentralized environment.
Something the founders of Deepstream only knew too well from their previous work at big banks and trading tech vendors like JP Morgan, HSBC, RBS and Caplin.
As they left they had another plan.
“Originally we’ve set out to build an equity trading platform in the cloud, but in the process we’ve developed something much more valuable. So we decided to fully concentrate on the underlying data distribution technology” says CEO Wolfram Hempel.
Deepstream has built a swarm technology for realtime data. Simply put, rather than a massive man shouting down a megaphone, hoping his audience will hear him, it works like a large, gossiping family where every member constantly knows what everyone else is up to.
Should a member fall sick - no problem - every other family member can fill her in once she recovered.
This happens blindingly fast - information travels from sender to receiver within less than a millisecond on average. And the swarm can scale - tests have shown that just six nodes are enough to process over four billion messages an hour.
Trading terminals, mobile devices, browsers and back office systems connect to this swarm and immediately become part of an ever-changing distributed state without having to worry about data integrity or message loss.
The founders of deepstream realized that companies would have most faith in such a mission critical system if it was under their complete control.
“We believe that any kind of fundamental technology like deepstream can only be successful if it is open, transparent and freely accessible. So we made it open source” says CTO and co-founder Yasser Fadl.
This move has not only helped the young company gain a 50.000 headstrong user base and a million dollar in VC funding, but also attracted a large and fast growing open source community that helped increase the product’s performance and security in a way no proprietary techfirm ever could.