TIBCO Unveils New High Speed Trading Technology

Competitors in Wall Street's electronic trading arms race got another tool today, as TIBCO Software officially unveiled a low-latency messaging solution that it says can relay messages between hosts in just 3 microseconds. The company says its TIBCO FTL middleware solution was developed in collaboration with Intel to take advantage of new technology like Westmere micro-architectures and Intel QuickPath, as well as high-speed networking over Infiniband and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

TIBCO says its new offering can push new frontiers in high speed trading, where minute advantages in message delivery translate into a significant competitive advantage.

"Markets have an insatiable need for speed," said Roy Schulte, Distinguished Analyst and Vice President, Gartner. "Low latency messaging technology is critical to any firm’s strategy to dominate today’s extreme-high-speed trading floors. Firms compete head-to-head on speed of execution, message volumes are exploding and integration needs are getting more and more complex. Firms are looking at messaging solutions to provide the lowest possible latency to beat the competition – but also to provide key capabilities so that they are agile enough to sustain that advantage."

When Nanoseconds Count

In testing, TIBCO said FTL displayed average application latency in test conditions of 384 nanoseconds for intra-host communication and 3.1 microseconds for inter-host communication. The company says the product, which was first previewed in May 2010, provides traders with the opportunity to better exploit faster networks and hardware.

"TIBCO’s new messaging technology is optimized for both intra-host and inter-host messaging, something that is critical in leading these paradigm shifts in computing," said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President and General Manager of the Intel Data Center Group. "As companies move more of their processing to multi-core machines, TIBCO FTL software running on Intel Xeon platforms will deliver an order of magnitude speed increase in areas where every microsecond—no every nanosecond—counts. We’re excited at the results of this engineering collaboration with TIBCO. We have created technology that is revolutionizing high performance messaging capabilities."

TIBCO Software Inc. (TIBX) provides infrastructure software for companies to use on-premise or as part of cloud computing environments. It has more than 4,000 customers worldwide.