Orc Launches FAST Data Integration App

CameronFAST conforms to version 1.1 of FAST and is being used by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to test its forthcoming FAST-based datafeed (IMD, 19 February). "They are going into production with it shortly. We're one of the official testers for readying their FAST market data… out of our Toronto office," says Orc chief technology officer John Cameron.

The product is available as a standalone application but also includes a class library for integration with other applications. "The open library means people can include it in their own applications… so they can compress and decompress data on our competitors' products or their own in-house products," Cameron says.

One of the benefits of FAST 1.1 is its interoperability, Cameron says. "The CME… showed us their template, we plugged it in … and straight away [were able to] automatically translate the data," he says.

Official benchmark tests are not complete, but Cameron says he has been able to encode and decode around 1.3 million fields per second running CameronFAST on his laptop, and believes the application could run up to 10 times faster on optimal hardware.

Although Cameron concedes that adding FAST encoding to existing processes will add an element of latency, he says Orc will "deeply" integrate FAST into its applications to actually reduce latency of communicating market and trade data. "We're… taking FAST right into the code, so this will actually change the internals of the market data server and universal server to natively talk FAST," he says.

This process into the core of Orc's applications is expected to be complete in Q4, 2007. The vendor is also developing a FAST datafeed as part of Nordic exchange group OMX's Genium platform. "We're committed to helping all our customers, including OMX, so they'll be using CameronFAST," Cameron says.