Exegy Bows Data Tone-Edge Cache Combo for Mid-Tier Buy-Side Firms

Exegy originally launched Data Tone in 2010 (IMD, Sept. 10, 2010) as an alternative to its deployed ticker plant appliances and managed services, to provide a normalized service for firms that don’t need heavy infrastructure and access to raw, low-latency datafeeds. “Those robust offerings are priced accordingly. But we would have smaller firms come to us and ask if there was a way they could use our services on a smaller scale,” says Exegy chief technology officer David Taylor.

The vendor launched Edge Cache a year later (IMD, June 13, 2011) to allow firms to distribute data processed by Exegy’s ticker plant internally to applications that require data but are not latency-sensitive enough to warrant direct connections to the ticker plant appliance. “Instead of a small number of very latency-sensitive applications, we were being asked to support lots of enterprise-wide applications,” Taylor adds.

He says the products had become “quite popular” with larger financial firms that need to send data between offices worldwide, but that Exegy’s sales team more recently identified a new potential audience for a bundled solution comprising Data Tone and Edge Cache that will allow clients to distribute a normalized data stream to multiple enterprise applications and locations beyond the originating datacenter.

This potential audience includes mid-tier asset managers and hedge funds—especially those that don’t have a large datafeed infrastructure within their corporate datacenter—that do not use latency-sensitive trading strategies, but still need low-latency data for best execution purposes, for example, Taylor says. 

Exegy first put a combined Data Tone-Edge Cache solution into production in the second half of 2015 at a major US asset management firm for whom the vendor first developed the underlying technology integration, and is now making it available to all interested parties.

Taylor says demand for these types of solutions that allow firms to distribute data more widely and efficiently without major infrastructure footprints is being driven by “tectonic shifts” in the way exchanges charge consumer firms to license market data. “Clients are all asking questions about how they can reduce the costs of market data—not just about how much they bring in, but about what they can switch on or off as needed. And as people take a bigger look at total cost of ownership, that is driving more people to our services,” he says.

Taylor says the vendor has dedicated one of its existing sales staff to this product line, and will increase its sales footprint as required by client demand.