ITRS Outlines New Product Roadmap for 2006

ITRS, a London-based vendor of software for monitoring real-time market data and trading systems, has begun rolling out a series of new product initiatives this year, as it sees its technology being used on a larger scale, says Rajiv Bala Subramanian, president and chief executive of ITRS Americas.

The first new product is Knowledge Base, which was released in February. The database allows a firm to share information on how it uses ITRS's systems to fix problems with its market data systems across the organization. For example, when someone fixes a problem, they enter notes on how they did it into the database. Colleagues in other divisions or offices can access that information via the ITRS front end and apply that experience if they have the same problem.

Subramanian says demand for such a product has become apparent in the last few months, as firms increasingly deploy their ITRS installations enterprise-wide to cover thousands of servers, multiple applications and geographies such as New York, Chicago, London and Tokyo.

"People are using our software in a more global manner… but we were still seeing cases of around 200 users in one firm who couldn't share that information," he says.

The beginning of this year also saw additions to ITRS' trader-oriented Outpost desktop display for monitoring system status (IMD, May 30, 2005). Output uses a traffic light-style display that is color-coded to flag any problems. Green means everything is operating smoothly, orange means that there may be some latency, and red indicates that a system or feed may be down. Now the vendor has added a Root Cause Analysis feature that allows traders to click on the colors and get information on the exact cause of a problem.

Looking forward, in the fourth quarter, ITRS will release the next generations of its EMS 2 Active Console user interface and its Gateway server software. The new version of Active Console will have an improved look and feel and better performance and new Java features such as dockable windows animations that will allow users to display moving real-time charts and graphs in three-dimensional planes. Sub ramanian says this will make it easier for users to visualize their systems in a graphical representation.

The new version of Gateway will also boast improved performance, Sub ramanian says, and will include a computational engine that allows users to apply specific calculations to their systems monitoring. For example, he says, it could be used to calculate a rolling average of latency across a 30-second period of time and display the results in Active Console—possibly along with maximum and minimum values, instead of just raw data.

Subramanian says the engine will be provided within Gateway with a set number of basic computations, such as maximum, minimum, average and standard deviation. Users will have to build more complex, individual computations themselves.

"The other thing in the pipeline is what we are calling the Active Dashboard," which should be available at the end of this year or the start of next year, Subramanian says. This is designed to give traders and managers the ability to create customizable dashboards of graphic modules known as "widgets."

He says this will comprise the next generation of Outpost, though it will include more than the current system. For example, the traffic light display will be one "widget," but users will be able to utilize others to display different types of data. This will include graphics such as pie charts, histograms and tables, all of which will change in real time. For example, users would be able to set up a permanent on-screen display of the 10 most-traded stocks by volume in real time by dragging and dropping data from the computation engine on to their Windows desktop. This cannot be displayed using the current version of Outpost.