News

StreamBase Updates Market Data Dev Tool

• By Kurt Mackie
• February 6, 2008

The product, StreamBase Reuters Edition, is typically used by hedge funds and investment banks to make split-second trading decisions. The solution is customized to work with the Reuters Market Data System and it uses Reuters' APIs to connect to streaming financial data.

Developers typically use StreamBase Reuters Edition to write very complicated programs that do quite a lot of work on the data that comes in, explained John Partridge StreamBase's vice president of industry solutions. These applications typically calculate trade decisions in a thousand of a millionth of a second's time in response to the data stream, he added.

A graphical modeling environment in StreamBase's solution cuts down the time needed to develop complex trading applications. It takes about 30 minutes to navigate the APIs using StreamBase as compared with two days if the developers had to sort through Reuters' complex APIs without the solution, according to Partridge.

StreamBase's graphical model authoring tool resembles an ETL tool and helps developers better communicate with nontechnical people, such as business traders, Partridge added.

"We provide an easy to use authoring tool and that tool connects through the back end to the Reuters feed," Partridge explained.

Apart from the customized Reuter's solution, StreamBase makes a general purpose platform that consists of an authoring tool, runtime engine (or high-performance event server) and the adapters that allow the solution to connect with existing IT infrastructure. In addition to its use in the financial sector, StreamBase's platform is used by intelligence agencies to sort through information.

"Some federal intelligence applications use our platform for taking in a stream of e-mails and news and [they] break it apart looking for key words or patterns of words and act on that unstructured text coming in," Partridge said.

StreamBase's solution differs from business event processing solutions due to its high-performance nature. There are two camps that lay claim to the CEP term, Partridge explained. One is concerned with business process management and human levels of latency. The other is interested in processing huge volumes of information, hundreds of thousands of messages per second, for the purposes of doing analytics that would feed other computer systems.

StreamBase's approach falls into the latter camp. StreamBase's event server can handle throughputs ranging from hundreds of thousands to a million messages per second, running on 64-bit OSes, Partridge said.

StreamBase Reuters Edition Version 2 is currently available here. A developer trial edition is available for free to Reuters customers.