Major Banks Join New STAC Benchmark Council
STAC yesterday used the High Performance on Wall Street event to announce the formation of the STAC Benchmark Council, an organization for the creation and management of customer-driven benchmark standards for trading technology. The group was launched with eight major securities firms as charter members, of which STAC is naming Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and HSBC.
STAC announced three sets of benchmarks that the group will define, corresponding to the three basic steps in making a trade:
- STAC-M (market data): benchmarks based on workloads such as direct exchange-feed integration, market data distribution, tick storage and retrieval, etc.
- STAC-A (analysis): benchmarks based on workloads such as trading algorithms, price generation, risk calculation, etc.
- STAC-E (execution): benchmarks based on workloads such as smart order routing, execution-related messaging, etc.
The group’s initial focus is on STAC-M benchmarks, particularly direct feed solutions and market data distribution. The group is currently reviewing the 0.5 draft of the STAC-M specifications and is due to finalise the specs by the end of 2007.
Voting membership in the group is open to all trading firms, with membership fees waived for 2007. Firms that join by November 30 will have the opportunity to vote on the 1.0 STAC-M specification. All vendors of products for use in the trading process can join as non-voting members. STAC itself has no vote. Interested firms should visit www.STACresearch.com/council.
The benchmarks developed will measure the performance of software components, such as market data systems, messaging middleware, and complex event processing systems (CEP), as well as underlying technologies, such as hardware-based feed and messaging solutions, hardware-based analytics accelerators, compute and data grid solutions, Infiniband and 10-gigabit Ethernet networks, multi-core processors, and the latest operating system and server technologies.
“Both customers and vendors tell us that benchmarks that directly relate to customer workloads are very useful,” said Peter Lankford, STAC Director. “And both camps believe that putting customers in control of benchmark standards makes perfect sense. STAC is uniquely positioned to facilitate this process, which we believe will reduce the cost of technology evaluation and fuel further innovation for the capital markets.”
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