Instinet To 'Push' Aside Neon For Bond Trading

LONDON--Push Technologies is to provide its Spiritintellect rules engine as part of Reuters Instinet's forthcoming fixed-income trading platform, nudging out the middleware offerings of New Era of Networks (Neon).

Neon's Neonet rules engine, part of the nascent Neon Trading System (NTS), was widely tipped to be part of Instinet's comprehensive basket of technology for its new fixed-income platform, but Instinet chose Spiritintellect instead, says chairman of the London-based Push, Steve Ross-Talbot. Neon introduced NTS to customers in New York early this year (TTW, March 1) and later had a formal unveiling in London (TTW, May 17); Neon officials did not return phone inquiries by press time.

The decision was a commercial one, says Duncan Johnston-Watts, Instinet's director of technology development for fixed income, aided by the fact that Instinet is already licensing Push products. However, Instinet does not rule out using Neon products "down the line", says Johnston-Watts. Instinet will soon begin beta testing its fixed-income platform and will probably go live with US Treasuries and Euro Sovereign bonds towards the end of this year (TTW, June 14).

Push's Spiritenterprise suite of products was chosen by Instinet as part of its core technology for the new, fixed-income trading service (TTW, June 14). Spiritintellect sits on top of Spiritwave2, an object bus with publish/subscribe messaging that will help users integrate Java Messaging Service (JMS)-based applications with Sun Microsystems' Javabeans and Corba object-oriented environments.

A major agency broker for Nasdaq, Instinet is targeting its fixed-income service at the sellside in an effort to build a brand name for itself in this area, say industry observers. In a parallel effort, Instinet is also revamping its equity trading platform (TTW, March 8) and taking major steps into the retail equities market.

To bolster its fixed-income trading system, Instinet will use Spiritintellect to complement Spiritwave2 by adding a distributed rules-based active information framework. Spiritintellect is a mechanism for specifying system-to-system work flow semantics in a large-scale distributed system.

The Spiritintellect software "will act as a bridge between the XML [Extensible Markup Language] API and legacy systems," says Johnston-Watts. XML will play a key role in Instinet's fixed-income transaction system, but not all legacy systems understand XML, he says. Spiritintellect will effectively be the client/server integrator for the API portion of XML.

While considered similar to HTML as well as its successor, XML is much more descriptive and context-sensitive than HTML. XML features tags that describe the content of XML documents, not just how it should look as it is with HTML. For all practical purposes, XML is a database in itself, enabling users to easily search, manipulate and process data contained in XML documents.

XML also makes data sharing easier. It allows users to side step the vagaries of data integration because it can be fine tuned to the specifics of an industry, and thus expressed in protocols for data sharing industry-wide. For instance, JP Morgan and PricewaterhouseCoopers are at work on FpML, or financial products mark-up language, a protocol for Internet-based electronic trading and information sharing of foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives products (TTW, June 14). Other similar efforts are in the works, as revealed at the recent Securities Industry Association (SIA) exhibit and conference (TTW, June 21).

For the fixed-income platform, Ross-Talbot says that Spiritintellect will be the "subscriber" to the published Instinet data. Spiritintellect agents will open the trade, get the data and decide where it needs to go and how it will get there, he says. Spiritintellect will help create XML streams for inbound and outbound data, says Johnston-Watts.

Instinet will be running a so-called boot camp this week in New York with Push providing training for Cambridge Technology Partners, the project developers who are doing the bulk of the integration work, and other partners, says Johnston-Watts. Ross-Talbot will be one of the instructors.

In a related move, Push will build a specification driver for Reuters Kondor+, says Ross-Talbot. Kondor+ is a front-end position keeping system for trade capture and risk management--of which the imminent update, Kondor+, version 1.9--will offer integration with The Information Bus (TIB) from Tibco (TTW, February 15). The Push driver is an adapter that allows Instinet to import trades into Kondor+.

Separately, Quant Trading has recently joined the Instinet technology line-up to develop a GUI front end initially for Quant customers who want to use Instinet's trading platform. Quant Trading is a software developer for the enterprise trading environment, specializing in fixed-income transaction systems and Web browser-based remote access to trading platforms, says Joe Kazis, a principal at Quant. Johnston-Watts says that Quant is the first independent trading platform to support Instinet.

Push Technologies was formed in the autumn of 1997 by Ross-Talbot and his co-workers from Nomura International in London; they were developing the active reference data manager used for the Hoodini project (TTW, February 16). Push's first major customer was Dresdner Bank and that project involved creating Corba wrappers for the legacy systems that make up the bank's risk management system; that contract actually ended last week, adds Ross-Talbot.