29West is releasing version 2.0 of the Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise (UME) product family, which includes features based on focused customer feedback from leading edge banks and exchanges as well as performance tuning and testing. The early access version of UME 2.0 has been shipping for the past three months, and the GA date has now been set. The UME 2.0 release sets a new standard in financial messaging due to three factors, the vendor claims: parallel persistence, metro area failover and reduced deployment cost.

The roll-out of Tibco Rendezvous 8.0, optimised for even lower latency according to the vendor, is expected to be “measured” in the larger shops running thousands of production instances of the middleware, but will be speedier in niche business areas – such as proprietary and algorithmic trading, particularly among prime brokers and hedge funds, its CTO, financial services, Spencer Greene predicts.

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In an earlier life, we spent some personal resource trying to help a friend at J.P. Morgan’s Morgan Markets figure out how to add visualization tools to the firm’s online offerings for individual investors. After some marketplace research, we settled on SmartMoney magazine’s Map of the Market application, as a low-cost alternative to the higher-end heatmap-type analytic offered by people like Innovest.

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When he emerged as a pioneer in the then-nascent digital trading room platform business back in the late 1980s, Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Teknekron Software Systems, had a vision that some, ourselves included, didn’t particularly want to hear about. That was because his vision embraced broad swathes of generic business, and we like many others didn’t consider the challenge of distributing real-time digital data around a trading room to have been solved.

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FaceTime Communications is rolling out its IM Auditor regulatory compliance system to Bloomberg’s Instant Bloomberg messaging facility. IM Auditor will ensure that messages passed through the Bloomberg system are compliant with regulations for capturing, archiving and reporting electronic messages, as laid out by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and self-regulatory organizations the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Securities Dealers. With Reuters already using FaceTime in its Reuters IM system, the deal represents a case of Bloomberg playing catch-up for once.

Reuters has signed an accord with America Online to link their respective instant messaging systems. Why, you ask. Well, in part because AOL operates the successful ICQ messaging system, but probably more likely because AOL claims its AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ and eponymous services between them are used by an estimated 54% of enterprise users. How many of this 54% would like to communicate with Reuters messaging clients is anybody’s guess. But given that IM is, as we’ve pointed out, a game of critical mass, it’s better to have the AOL masses with you rather than against you.