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Persistence Adds Live Messaging to PowerTier with Trade'Em Demo

In a demo with Sun Microsystems at the SIA show, Persistence unveils a new feature that allows traders to subscribe to real-time updates, without asking systems departments to write complex code.

Persistence Software unveiled a live-content-feed report generator that's bundled into its PowerTier application server 6.0--an application server written in Enterprise Java Beans used to build global trading systems.

Traders can subscribe to real-time updates without asking their systems departments to write complex infrastructure code. Persistence is showing the new real-time messaging feature in Sun Microsystem's booth (#4100) as part of its Trade'em demo, which is the same architecture used by the Instinet global fixed-income trading system. Other financial firms that are building capital markets trading systems on PowerTier include CSFB and WOFEX, a new ECN .

The new publish and subscribe-like capability, called LiveReport, comes from Isocra, a developer of object-oriented systems based in Cambridge, England. LiveReport works with Persistence PowerTier to report live content based on data extracted from Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). For instance, in real time, LiveReport can broadcast a message to everyone who cares when a 30-Treasury bond trade occurs, says Jim Barton, chief technology officer of Persistence. If someone is looking for arbitrage opportunities, they could register to receive every bid or offer, he says. "This is the foundation of the Instinet system," he adds.

According to the news released yesterday, Instinet Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reuters Group PLC, has licensed LiveReport from Isocra, and will make it available to customers as an option for PowerTier later this year. "Today, reporting has to be personalized and delivered on an as-needed basis as information changes," states Duncan Johnston-Watt, managing director, fixed-income technology at Instinet. "Traditional client/server technology with its request/response semantics doesn't deliver the kind of performance demanded by large-scale B2B systems."

This is a standard requirement of trading systems, says Barton, but the difference here, is that developers of capital markets trading systems had the option of either building it themselves, or hiring someone to build it. "No one wants to build this type of infrastructure if you can buy a standard, tested component," says Barton, adding that Persistence has made this an "out of the box" solution.

Instinet's is the world's largest fixed-income trading system, says Stephen Easton, product manager for PowerTier. It uses both the EJB and C++ versions of PowerTier, and is globally deployed on server sites all over the world. Persistence's PowerTier is an application server architecture known for its ability to synchronize distributed caches with remote servers. A cache stores data in memory as opposed to a disk. The strength of PowerTier is taking the cache and distributing it across multiple machines, says Easton. Because it's a lot faster to store in memory, PowerTier is being used to build electronic capital markets trading systems for equities, fixed income and derivatives, says Barton.

With Instinet, the bids and offers are stored in cache and then distributed to remote servers around the world. "The old way is to store bids and offers in a central database," but in with traders in London and Tokyo, "equal access to data at all time" is necessary, says Easton.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio

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