Sona Mobile Readies Enterprise App

NEW YORK—Sona Mobile, a wireless application developer, is readying an enterprise version of its MobileMarkets streaming, real-time market data service, Sona officials tell DWT.

While mobile technologies will not re place distribution platforms, some firms are increasing their real-time use of wireless distribution, Sona officials say.

The vendor has recently completed two user firm trials of MobileMarkets Enterprise Edition and is debuting the commercial version of the offering this month, says Evan Bauer, managing director, technology operations at Sona, based in New York.

The enterprise version of Mobile Markets will accept market data feeds from legacy market data distribution platforms such as Reuters' TIB/ Rendezvous, Triarch and Trading Room System (TRS) (formerly from Telerate) as well as the next-generation Reuters Market Data System (RMDS), Bauer says.

The Enterprise Edition service is able to accommodate the Reuters market data infrastructures because "we subscribe to the multicast," Bauer says. The TIB, Triarch and RMDS environments offer real-time market data distribution multicasting backbones. "It's also DACS-compliant," says Bauer, referring to the Reuters Data Access Control System (DACS) that governs market data permissioning. "You don't have to pay exchange fees twice," he says.

Working behind firewalls, the Enterprise Edition software will deliver real-time, market data—either separately or co-mingled—from vendors to a variety of handheld devices. The handheld environments supported include BlackBerry, Symbian, J2ME, Microsoft Windows Mobile, iMode and Palm, according to Sona.

Sona is no stranger to the financial services sector. The TelerateMobile service, which offers select views of market data via BlackBerry devices, was developed using technology from the Sona Wireless Platform (SWP), which distributes data from server farms to handheld devices (Inside Market Data, Aug. 9, 2004).

The SWP is a key component of the Enterprise service, and consists of software layers for administration, communications, security, mobile workflow and integration, Sona officials say. Some of the major building blocks for SWP are the Java programming language, support for messaging such as Java Message Service (JMS) and IBM WebSphere MQ, database support through the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API for executing SQL statements and the Microsoft .Net development framework. SWP and other Sona offerings "have been under constant development since 1998," Bauer says.

Users can set up watch lists and news filters as well alert notifications through e-mail, text messaging and the Short Message Service (SMS) service for sending notes to mobile devices via the Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication service, Sona officials say.