Author Bios
Pete Harris is Editor and Publisher of Low-Latency.com. He is also President, Americas and Editor-at-Large at A-Team Group, a publishing, research and events company focused on the deployment of information technologies in the global financial markets. Low-Latency.com is a service of A-Team.
Pete is a regular contributor to A-Team’s coverage of the financial markets IT space, focusing on front-office, low-latency and technology infrastructure.
Before joining A-Team, Pete worked as an independent consultant, advising technology innovators on how to best position their products and services to serve Wall Street and the financial markets.
Prior to working as a technology consultant, Pete held a number of editorial, publishing and management positions – including Editor-in-Chief and President – at Waters Information Services (now Incisive Media). There, he spearheaded the company’s move into events and online services.
Earlier in his career, Pete specialised in software development. In the mid 1980s, he was a project manager and software architect, working in the Advanced Systems Group of the London Stock Exchange. At the LSE, Pete built one of the world’s first digital market data distribution systems, dubbed Radix. He has also held a variety of software management and development roles at Intercom Data Systems (now Fidessa), Knight-Ridder Unicom (since merged into Reuters) and the Financial Times.
Blogposts
Datacom Systems - a vendor of network taps and matrix switches - has appointed Kevin Formby as its new president and CEO. Formby joins from packet capture/latency monitoring specialist Endace, and as such brings with him much experience of the financial markets vertical in general, and low-latency infrastructure in particular. On the heels of Formby's on-boarding, Datacom has introduced a new matrix switch targeted at co-location environments.
The last week or so has seen significant action in the world of exchange co-location - a space (excuse the pun) that as a whole is hotter than ever - with happenings at CME Group and Nasdaq OMX.
Solarflare Communications has announced its ApplicationOnload Engine (AOE) - combining 10gE networking with FPGA technology that allows trading applications to run fully on a network card, for the lowest latency.
Following on from an announcement at the end of last year, a consortium of IT vendors has published a white paper outlining a reference stack for high performance trading applications, and has documented a set of benchmarks conducted on commercial and open source FIX engines to demonstrate different performance characteristics of the stack.
Brennan Carley is back at Reuters, albeit it's now Thomson Reuters and no doubt it has changed a bit since he was last there in a strategy role, around 1999/2000. His new job is as global head of the Elektron platform, the company's low-latency managed hosting/co-location business.
As anticipated, Bloomberg is opening up the interface via which it provides market data to other market data and application vendors, on a free-use basis. It's part of the vendor's Open Market Data Initiative, which also extends to market data symbology, as previously announced.
Intel's planned acquisition of QLogic's InfiniBand business - announced last week - further advances its general 'world domination' plans in networking. And while its aspirations go way beyond low-latency trading, expect a trickle down that will over time impact how automated trading systems are implemented.
Lime Brokerage has rolled out its LimeDirect pre-trade risk service - providing compliance for SEC rule 15c3-5 while adding minimal latency. But unlike competitive services, the offering - which Lime officials say is based on an "innovative blend of hardware and software" - does not leverage FPGA technology, because Lime technologists believe it is too inflexible in terms of rapid code development and ongoing maintenance.
NYSE Technologies has gone live with dual Liquidity Centres in Toronto, the latest in the rollout of its network of trading hubs, following on from its primary operations in Mahwah, NJ, and Basildon, UK, and the more recent opening in Tokyo.
Bats Europe has set an end of April go-live date for migration of Chi-X Europe's trading system, running on Bats technology at Equinix, near London. Separately, Bats Global Markets in the U.S. says it will house its backup trading systems at a Savvis data centre in downtown Chicago.
