The MarketXS FIX Engine was originally designed to serve as the heart of MarketXS TradeNet, the hosted FIX-based order routing platform delivered by MarketXS that enables the transparent routing of orders between multiple execution venues and institutions, with the ability to add new brokers or exchanges with a single message normalization step.

TradeNet is used by MarketXS customers for direct access to multiple execution venues for multiple asset classes, and for the delivery of privately branded trading screens with integrated market data functions to their customers. With the first official release of the MarketXS FIX Engine, it is now also available as a stand-alone application or as an adaptor to TradeNet for more complex STP integration requirements, thus allowing third-party systems to connect to the FIX-based TradeNet platform without having to invest in FIX engines.

One of the most prominent features of the MarketXS FIX Engine is its ability to provide a 100% "exactly-once-delivery" guarantee, allowing traders to maintain full control over their order flow under any circumstances. This is done through the FIX Engine's transactional Java API that engages in a distributed transaction with the user's trading application, with the Engine's transaction manager coordinating the distributed components. As a critical feature in particular in Enterprise Application Integration environments that are built around transactional messaging platforms such as JMS, TIB/RendezVous or WebsphereMQ, it ensures that the FIX connection does not become the weakest link, which it currently often is. To the extent that orders are executed within the MarketXS TradeNet environment (e.g. by its internal matching engine), the MarketXS FIX Engine delivers such 'exactly-once-semantics' on an end-to-end basis, i.e. from origination to execution. To the extent that trades are sent to external execution venues, this can only be guaranteed if the execution venue also uses a transactional FIX API.

Says Ronald Kleinveld, Chief Operating Officer of MarketXS: "Where most available FIX engines make attempts to reduce the risk of losing or duplicating trade messages, they offer a best-efforts promise rather than full security. The MarketXS FIX Engine is unique in offering a 100% guarantee that no trade messages will be lost or duplicated, which is valuable in particular for professional, multi-user, multi-asset class high-throughput environments."

The MarketXS FIX Engine is designed for high-performance, guaranteed scalability and transactionality, and zero maintenance. Being very easy to operate, the MarketXS FIX Engine allows for cross-asset class trading by supporting all asset classes specified within the FIX Protocol. The MarketXS FIX Engine offers a special high-speed mode to serve high-performance requirements, and supports both FIXML and version 4.0 up to and including version 4.4 of the FIX protocol. The engine comes with a monitoring tool and offers full message validation capabilities and automatic translation between tag-value and FIXML for all FIX versions supported.