SuperDerivatives and Liffe have formed a partnership to provide SuperDerivatives’ users with direct access to the Liffe Connect electronic trading platform. SuperDerivatives users will be able to see streaming prices from the Euronext exchange and interact with the market through SuperDerivatives’ web-based applications. SuperDerivatives pricing system will merge OTC prices with exchange prices to maximise transparency for users with the target of tightening the bid/offer spreads in the corresponding exchange products.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure, as the old saying goes, and if the flurry of vendor announcements in recent weeks is anything to go by, there is now a vastly increased range of solutions out there to enable firms to monitor, and therefore better manage, latency in their market data and trading infrastructures.

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Börse Berlin has recruited London-based Knowledge Technology Solutions to develop and host a web portal that will provide access to prices from the pan-European trading platform Equiduct. Börse Berlin says the KTS system will provide access to the Equiduct VBBO – virtual best bid/offer – as soon as the trading platform launches. The KTS portal will be accessible via the Equiduct Trading web site from April 2008. Pre and post-trade data from Equiduct’s Hybrid and PartnerEx market segments will be available online in mid-2008.

Trading Systems Associates (TS-Associates) is trumpeting two global deals with “top tier” financial institutions for its middleware analysis product TipOff. The product will be deployed by a German bank across all five of its regional investment banking centres, according to the vendor, providing passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feeds and real-time middleware analysis of its Wombat and RMDS platforms.

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Assuring the latency of the market data infrastructure supporting an electronic trading system is as low as it is says on the tin is becoming a key element of financial institutions’ performance measure-ment of their high-performance systems. London-based market data systems specialist Trading Systems Associates says it has sold 25 instances of its new TipOff middleware analysis appliance, which monitors the performance of market data platforms like Reuters Market Data System, Tibco Rendezvous and 29West LatencyBusters Middleware (LBM).

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Wombat Financial Software has continued in its bid to widen its product offering through the acquisition of Harco Technology, a U.K.-based provider that analyzes banks’ market data usage and compliance with suppliers’ contract terms. The importance of compliance with data suppliers contract terms has risen in recent months following a series of settlements – including Citibank’s high-profile $10 million settlement with the London Stock Exchange (Market Data Insight, May 2006) – resulting from unauthorized use of market data.

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IBM last month quietly reentered the trading-room platform marketplace with what looks like an all-singing, all-dancing low-latency market data distribution platform for both consolidated and direct exchange feeds. The IBM WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets platform is targeted at both electronic trading and human decision-support applications, and appears set to compete directly with Reuters’ Market Data System (RMDS).

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Much has been made of the hosted Reuters Data Feed Direct (RDF Direct) as evidence of the big U.K. vendor’s commitment to the world of high-volume, low-latency data. But a look under the proverbial hood of the recently released latest version of the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) in fact reveals perhaps a more significant step toward offering management of the kinds of value-added data required by high-performance clients, particularly given that RDF Direct is a tactical solution to the problem of handling the massively high-volume Options Price Reporting Authority (Opra) data feed.

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A full year after rolling it out to the first of a handful of early-adopter clients, Wombat Financial Software is taking the wraps off Wombat TCP, a set of additional data-handling capabilities that transform its direct exchange feedhandler platform to a full-blown trading room display system. The move effectively puts Wombat in head-to-head competition with Reuters Market Data System (RMDS), the set-to-mushroom $150 million trading room platform market’s dominant product by a long shot.

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About half of all financial institutions plan to upgrade their existing voice trading systems over the next three years, according to a survey sponsored by turret provider BT. This - given BT’s 60,000 positions in the field alone - represents a whole host of new business for the dominant voice systems providers, amongst whom BT is joined by IPC and Etrali in the Top 3 globally.

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Hyperfeed Technologies has outlined a bold plan for the Trading Room System (TRS) platform it has acquired as a byproduct of Reuters’ deal to buy Telerate. As well as stepping up to fulfill the role of No. 2 provider of digital distribution platforms to the trading room marketplace, behind Reuters’ Market Data System (RMDS), Triarch and Tibco TIB/Rendezvous products, Hyperfeed is promulgating the use of TRS as the basis of a shared-infrastructure business model that could change the way financial institutions consume market data.

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Meff, the Spanish futures exchange, is planning a major upgrade to its technology platform. The exchange’s IT centres in Madrid and Barcelona are now capable of handling 2.3 million outgoing messages and 685,000 incoming messages per year. The upgrade of the Meff S/Mart platform was conducted in conjunction with Sun Microsystems, and means the exchange can handle update rates of as high as 800 transaction messages per second. The project will involve replacement of some 200 Solaris servers.

Notwithstanding our assertions last month that it would be squeezed at both ends of the data delivery infrastructure landscape, the trading room platform business saw some significant activity in the past month. To much fanfare, the two leading protagonists – Reuters and Moneyline Telerate – have snagged major deals for their respective products. Maybe there’s life in the old dog yet.

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We’ve been waiting all year for Bloomberg finally to make a move on the data feed front. While no official word has been forthcoming, a New York trade newspaper recently offered the following snippet, which piqued our interest no end:

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Now that Reuters has officially stated its obsolescence plans for the Tibco TIB/Rendezvous and Triarch trading room platforms, it can get down to the serious business of making sure it retains those platform clients, with its new Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) offering. With no major competitor in sight, nothing could be simpler, right?

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Six months or so ago, users of the ever-popular Reuter Trader Workstation (RTW) component of the Triarch trading room system were told that the display software was to be obsoleted in the summer of 2003. Users were urged to upgrade to the heavier Kobra display. This sparked a mini-revolt, particularly in London, the piloting of many browser-based alternatives and talk of Reuters losing the plot.

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After almost a decade in the wilderness, trading room systems are back in fashion. Why? Because the company who had sewn up the market during the early and middle 1990s decided to open it all back up again.

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As more details leak out about the (apparently still) impending Reuters Market Data System (RMDS), applications providers are underwhelmed by Reuters’ commitment to open systems. According to the RMDS pricing document currently being distributed, Reuters will introduce new charges that appear to be protective of its own Reuters Data Feed (RDF)- delivered market data services.

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Reuters made a hullabaloo last month about offering its next-generation market data platform on Linux. But could the announcement turn out to be a red herring? Reuters’ market data platform clients aren’t particularly happy campers at the moment. They want to know precisely the architecture of the Reuters Market Data System, which elements will be derived from TIB and which from Triarch, and why they have to trade in their beloved RTWs for the universally loathed Kobra front-end display system. Talking about Linux is all well and good – as is rolling out a strategic client like Morgan Stanley to say what a great idea it is. But the majority of customers want answers to more basic – and more pressing – questions. Now, wasn’t there supposed to be a white paper ….

Reuters appears to be taking a tough stance with clients keen to cling to their TIB and Triarch market data platforms as the vendor moves toward migration to its new Reuters Market Data System (RMDS). The dominant global platform provider is seeking to leverage its 80%+ market position to penalize firms that try to retain TIB/Triarch using third-party data and platform applications, according to documents seen by A-Team Insight.

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