Redline Trading Offers Bridge to Shift OpenMAMA Trading Applications to its Ticker Plant

Redline Trading Solutions said today it is releasing a bridge from its InRush3 market data ticker plant to OpenMAMA-based trading applications without requiring firms to rewrite these applications.

The move will position Redline to offer its market data to customers that have developed trading applications that run on OpenMAMA, the open source implementation of NYSE Technologies’ legacy Middleware Agnostic Messaging API.

“The purpose is that a binary application can get market data from multiple vendors without changing their applications,” said Mark Skalabrin, CEO of Redline Trading Solutions in an interview. “You can get one API that runs the MOMA API and you can be retrieving data from NYSE’s ticker plant, Reuters, or Exegy and Redline’s tricker plants, and that would give the customer protection on their application,” said Skalabrin.

OpenMAMA is the open source version of Middleware Agnostic Messaging API (MAMA), which NYSE Technologies acquired from Wombat in 2008. In 2011, NYSE Technologies took the initiative to open source MAMA, which provides a consistent abstraction layer over a variety of message-oriented middleware products. NYSE Technologies turned OpenMAMA over to the Linux Foundation, where it’s become an open-source collaborative project that is governed by a steering committee whose members include J.P. Morgan Co., Bank of America Merrill Lynch, EMC, Exegy and Fixnetix among other vendors. OpenMama has been widely adopted by banks and trading firms because it gives firms more control over their applications and avoids vendor lock-in.

Firms tend to use a variety of market data vendors, such as Reuters for every global exchange, Wombat for low latency applications written to the Wombat API and Redline for ultra-low latency applications written to its InRush API.

Redline’s bridge will also enable customers to shrink from three-to-two providers of market data without having to rewrite their applications to its API, according to Redline officials. For example, if a customer is using Redline’s market data for latency critical applications in their environment, they could also use Redline to feed lots of applications using the Wombat MAMA legacy API as well. “So they can take a legacy application today that is up and running and receiving data from NYSE Technologies and instead, we can publish into that API and they wouldn’t have to change their application,” explained Skalabrin. “The value for customers is that they have one vendor in Redline that is providing market data for multiple applications and managing one vendor would be easier and less costly,” he said.

Redline’s timing for the new protocol converter comes as NYSE Technologies is being put up for sale by its owner Intercontinental Exchange. Earlier this month, ICE said it would sell off technology businesses that are part of NYSE Technologies, including Wombat market data solutions company. ICE hired investment bank Evercore Partners to offer, Nyfix, SuperFeed, Wombat and Metabit to potential buyers through presentations in the second half of this month, reported Bloomberg News.

Financial firms that built trading applications based on Wombat's 12-year old MAMA technology and use its feed handlers may be nervous about the sale of the division.

One of the main advantages of Redline providing market data via OpenMAMA is its platform has lower latency than other platforms being used with the protocol, according to Skalabrin. What’s more, Redline can provide data with one server, whereas they might otherwise require a rack full of servers, said Skalabrin. The feed handlers, which publish the data feeds out to client applications, typically run on different servers using the OpenMAMA API. Redline said it can terminate the feeds on a single server. “That is a big operational cost savings,” said Skalabrin. “We can shrink the server footprint to feed those applications, yet they can still keep the applications unchanged,” he added.

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