FPL Releases Fast 1.1; Opra is Early Adopter
From A-Team Group’s Market Data Insight, January 2007: FIX Protocol Ltd (FPL) has released version 1.1 of its FIX Adapted for Streaming (Fast) Protocol data compaction methodology.
FPL calls the release of version 1.1 “yet another significant milestone” in the development Fast. According to Kevin Houstoun, consultant to HSBC, co-chair of the FPL Global Technical Committee, the new version upgrades in two main ways from version 1.0.
First, it provides includes an explicit template definition specification, where previously counterparties were left to their own devices to choose between templates for certain data fields. This, Houston says, raises the level of standardization in the protocol.
Second, it introduces a broad range of functionality that rounds out the specification, again raising the level of standardization. These elements of functionality have been identified by almost a year of deployment in the field, where users have requested adjustments and additional capabilities in order to get full use from the protocol in building market data applications.
The adoption by Opra of the new spec is perhaps a greater milestone than the release of version 1.1. Houston says getting Opra on board represents a significant endorsement. “It takes global adoption of the Fast protocol one step closer to being a fait accompli,” he says. For its part, Opra plans to use Fast to replace its existing AutoLink system. The organization reckons it will take around six months to deploy and test the new Fast-based platform.
The Fast protocol leverages implicit tagging, field encoding and binary representation of data, thereby optimizing communication in the electronic exchange of financial data. Fast has been designed to process large quantities of data that share similarities in content and structure.
The Fast protocol’s ongoing development has been helped along by extensive testing supported by the protocol’s sponsors, which include Archipelago (now part of the New York Stock Exchange), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the International Securities Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, the Singapore Stock Exchange and Microsoft.
These proof-of-concept tests, FPL says, demonstrated that the Fast Protocol is capable of radically reducing message size and bandwidth utilization by compressing FIX data feeds by up to 90% without negatively impacting latency. This, FPL says, makes it applicable in many instances within the market data area, as well as in other areas “demanding high compression and low latency communication such as high frequency trading, direct market access and exchange interfaces.”
