IBM recently announced expanded feed coverage and additional features for the WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets version 3 platform designed to help financial firms efficiently handle enormous amounts of data from multiple, disparate sources and make electronic trading decisions based on this information more quickly than ever before. WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets offers data vendor independence and can accept feeds from virtually any provider. Supported feeds include major U.S. and international data sources, and primarily come from the major financial and securities exchanges around the world. The system can also simultaneously offer varying levels of quality of service depending on the type of application that requires the data (e.g., front office trading systems would require a higher level of service in terms of reduced data feed latency versus back office risk management systems that can tolerate a bit more latency).

Guy Tagliavia, director of WebSphere Front Office and Low Latency Messaging for IBM Software Group, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "WebSphere Front Office processes individual exchange feeds and consolidated feeds, and provides the data directly from exchanges which provides faster processing. The data can be fed to front-end algorithmic trading applications, mid-tier position keeping applications that capture trades once they have occurred, and back-end risk management systems that evaluate the level of risk of trades over time."  

WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets includes dozens of feed handlers supporting more than 70 data feeds including major U.S. and international data sources, consolidated order book functionality, and high-speed multicast and point-to-point messaging support. It can process millions of messages per second from an increasing number of feeds in microseconds.

The new features included in version 3 are 13 new feed handlers addressing North American and European markets, platform enhancements, including a remote caching server to help support distribute deployment environments, significant performance improvements including a greater than 40% latency improvement and a 90% throughput improvement on options pricing over previous versions, and consolidated order book enhancements for expanded horizontal scalability (order books show all quotes, bids, and asks on a financial instrument being traded on a given exchange). For more information on WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets version 3, go here.