Direct Edge Adopts 29West's High Speed Messaging Platform

With UME serving as the exchange's messaging backbone, Direct Edge experienced a major reduction in overall system latency and increased throughput.

Direct Edge, operator of several equity trading venues, has adopted 29West’s Ultra Messaging family of products as its enterprise-wide high-speed messaging platform, according to an announcement at the SIFMA Technology Management Show.

After boosting its matched market share of U.S. equity trades from just under 5 percent in October 2008 to over 12.5 percent currently, Direct Edge has grown to be the third largest stock market in the nation, behind the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, according to the release. In order to deal with the level of growth, a more efficient messaging system was required by Direct Edge, according to the release. Direct Edge then determined that 29West’s Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise (UME) was the solution capable of delivering the required levels of performance, scalability and reliability.

Direct Edge is using UME to integrate applications across the entire exchange, from its front-end gateways through its matching engines to back-end conpliance systems. According to the release, with 29 West’s UME serving as the messaging backbone for the exchange, Direct Edge has realized a major reduction in overall system latency, and increased throughput, and resiliency, while reducing infrastructure throughput by more than 50 percent. This has resulted in substantial savings on development, datacenter and support costs, stated the release.

“The flexibility to use TCP and Reliable Multicast, with the option of streaming and persistence in different portions of the overall exchange architecture is ideal,” stated John Ryan, chief architect, Direct Edge. “This allowed us to implement key designs to achieve low latency order flow processing, even during times of high-volume, volatile trading. We can leverage UME’s breadth of features under a single API to deploy new capabilities and respond much more rapidly to changing business and regulatory requirements,” further stated Ryan in the release.

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