First Derivatives To Launch Tick As A Service On NYSE Cloud
NYSE Technologies, the development arm of NYSE Euronext exchanges, is launching its first third-party software as a service (SaaS) application to run on its VMware-based cloud.
First Derivatives, which sells a number of applications for managing market and reference data in the financial services sector as well as mission-critical trading and risk management systems, is bringing a pierce of its Delta suite of applications to the NYSE Technologies cloud. Specifically, the two will offer something they are calling Tick as s Service, and it will take the historical and real-time data from NYSE Euronext feeds and make it available for the algorithmic trading and back testing components of the First Derivatives stack, which is called Delta Algo.
The idea, says a spokesperson for NYSE, is to get the Delta applications running on the same infrastructure as the market feeds, which means you don't have to download the data to a platform running Delta and deal with all of the compliance and security issues. When you run it on NYSE Technologies' own cloud, you also eliminate some latencies with moving data offsite, and in the trading game, nanoseconds are starting to matter.
Jon Robson, CEO at First Derivatives, says this is the first of many services it plans to offer, and presumably the others will also be running on the NYSE Technologies cloud. The other modules in the Delta suite include Delta Stream, which captures real-time and historical data and allows querying and complex event processing against it; Delta Data factory, which does comprehensive data capture and distribution; Delta Flow, which does multi-asset class pricing and execution for asset trading; and Delta Risk, which does risk management and compliance for all of this data that is flying around.
That NYSE Technologies cloud is called the Capital Markets Community Platform. That cloud does not replace the co-location facilities that NYSE Euronext runs on behalf of banks, hedge funds, and high frequency traders that have hundreds of thousands of servers running in two data centers, one in Mawah, New Jersey, west of New York and the other in Basildon, east of London, England. The cloud, which has EMC storage and is diced and sliced by VMware hypervisors on top of servers that NYSE Technologies has not divulged by make or model, was launched in June 2011 and was aimed at batch work that is done outside of trading, such as algorithm testing, batch processing of statements, regulatory filings, and other work where latencies between the stock exchange feeds and the machines doing the processing are not a big deal.
Financial firms don't usually get the data for the day's trading almost until midnight, and downloading it to their systems takes many more hours after that. So if they want to run their latest algos against the latest data, they have to wait. But inside the NYSE Technologies cloud, when the data is released, they can just start chewing on it right there. And, they don't have to pay for expensive wide area network links. And, this being a SaaS offering, financial firms can shift from having to buy the Delta Algo license and the systems to run it, which is a CapEx hit, to paying for it as a service, which moves to the OpEx side of the balance sheet.
The Tick as a Service offering from First Derivatives will be available in October.
