Exegy Sharpens ‘Edge’ for Data Distribution

St. Louis, Mo.-based hardware ticker plant vendor Exegy will this week release the Exegy Edge Cache data distribution appliance to enable clients to distribute market data processed by the vendor’s ticker plant to applications that require direct feeds but are not latency-sensitive enough to require direct connections to the ticker plant.

Edge Cache, which occupies one unit of rack space and plugs into a port on the Exegy ticker plant using an Infiniband connection, allows clients to distribute data from the ticker plant to internal data customers within their firm, including risk management and portfolio valuation systems that may require regular best-bid-and-offer updates. Clients can also use Edge Cache to distribute indexes created by the ticker plant’s basket calculation engine within their firm, and to capture data from and connect to low-latency messaging layers from Informatica—which acquired messaging provider 29West, who had integrated its middleware with Exegy’s ticker plant (IMD, March 8, 2010)—says Jeff Wells, vice president of product marketing at Exegy.

Demand has been highest among Exegy’s bank and hedge fund clients that previously used software on generic servers to distribute the data from Exegy’s ticker plant, which becomes hard to maintain as data volumes grow, requiring more servers, says Scott Parsons, chief scientist at Exegy. By reducing the amount of maintenance and servers required, Edge Cache users can lower their total cost of ownership, Parsons adds.

As firms increasingly move from consolidated feeds to direct exchange feeds captured via ticker plants in co-location facilities, they are also starting to cluster risk management and other applications in those same facilities, where Edge Cache could provide a cost-effective way of ensuring all the systems receive the data they need, Wells says.