Vhayu is certainly not alone in recognizing this demand: Activ Financial, Wombat, Streambase, Progress Apama and IBM are among the many other vendors that have recently expanded their fast market data handling products to cover new asset classes. "It's not surprising, we'll continue to see the larger players try to move into this marketplace as other markets beyond equities continue to face similar challenges that folks are facing in the equities market currently," Lee says.

Vhayu's Velocity platform is event stream processing (also known as complex event processing or CEP) software that lets Wall Street firms quickly build algorithmic trading programs that imbibe large and fast-moving streams of real-time market data and use the information to make real-time decisions. One distinguishing characteristic of Velocity is that it's based on an ultra-fast database -- other CEP vendors such as Streambase and Progress Apama work with traditional relational databases such as Oracle and Sybase. In this sense, its closest competitor is Kx systems, another fast market data database provider. Whether or not having this specialized underlying database gives Vhayu a significant advantage depends on a firm's market data infrastructure, Lee says. "If you're trying to store market data in a traditional relational database, there's a lag time because relational databases weren't built for that," he says. "Players like Kx and Vhayu are able to perform real-time processing but also capture those important data points into their databases and be able to access those data points and help users make decisions in a timely manner." On the other hand, firms that are happy with their existing databases tend to prefer CEP software that works with what they already have. Another differentiator for Vhayu is that it was the first CEP product to be able to perform real-time market data analysis alongside historical testing.

Vhayu's news today is that it now offers off-the-shelf adaptors for data feeds from Activ Financial, IDC and Lava, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Thus it will be able to work with market data on North American equities, options and futures, as well as the sources it already supports: Reuters data feeds, direct feed handlers for Options Price Reporting Authority and all Japanese exchanges. Customers will also have access to a feed handler development kit that lets them develop direct connections to any market data source. "This is an important announcement in the sense that they've clearly recognized that this is not an equities-only issue, that there are opportunities in other asset classes," Lee says. "As people look at challenges they're facing in equities, options, futures, fx and so on, the ability to provide an off-the-shelf platform that firms could build trading programs around is very important."

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