The Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), a company that helps other companies work together to develop software, this week announced its first products based on its Open Market Data architecture (it previously developed feed handlers that are resold by middleware provider Tervela). These initial products are a set of feed handlers that support three exchange data sources: FAST OPRA V2, ArcaBook Multicast and ITCH 4.0.

The open architecture CSI uses allows these feed handlers to easily integrate with any middleware product or directly into low latency trading applications, the company says.

Wall Street should welcome these new feed handlers, according to CSI's director of financial services Richard Reichgut. "A lot of financial institutions spend an incredible lot of money, time and resources on building out market data infrastructures themselves," he says. "And they really don't want to be in that business any more."

CSI and Intel say they have tested the CSI Feed Handler for OPRA on an Intel Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) processor and obtained speeds in excess of 3.7 million messages per second — more than four times the peak rate of today's options markets. At these rates, the latency per message in the feed handler is substantially less than one microsecond, they say.