Exegy, a provider of hardware-accelerated market data appliances, and MDX Technology, a provider of real-time market data connectivity, have extended their business partnership to enable Exegy’s operational content to be delivered via MDX Technology’s MDXT Connect into Microsoft Excel for real-time monitoring purposes.

Recent enhancements to MDXT Connect expand its capabilities to accept real-time operational content, which includes data rates from raw feeds entering an Exegy appliance, data rates from user-defined normalized feeds transmitted by an Exegy appliance, raw data feed transmission delays, and API performance statistics from every application connected to an appliance, the companies said in a release.

MDXT Connect is an Excel plug-in allowing the user to source real-time normalized market data, including both top-of-book and depth-of-book views of the market, from a range of platforms.

“Essentially what they are some plug-ins that plug into Microsoft Excel that let you then tap into real time streaming data,” Scott Parsons, chief information officer at Exegy, told Markets Media. “So imagine you’re at your desktop and you open up Excel, and what you see in there are a bunch of numbers that keep continually updating in real time. Those numbers can actually reflect prices of financial instruments, or they can reflect what we think of as operational content that gives people a good feeling for how well their different plant and market data infrastructure states are actually functioning.”

MDX Technology chief executive officer Paul Watmough said in a statement: “We have successfully delivered a solution that helps front-line support groups proactively monitor their mission-critical feed delivery infrastructure. A major investment bank is using this solution to monitor multiple hardware-accelerated appliances from Exegy, and we have significant interest from additional firms on both the buy-side and sell-side.”

In 2013, MDX Technology and Exegy announced a partnership to deliver Exegy’s market data via MDX Technology’s MDXT Connect into Microsoft Excel.

“We started our partnership with the idea that there are certain types of market data consumers that would like to get that normalized market data into Excel so they can do what-if financial analysis,” Parsons said. “We worked with MDXT to essentially wrap up our API to get feed information into Excel. We since have expanded that and through our API we have a mechanism of getting at what we think of as operational content, so it’s not information that’s directly related to the market data feed but its information about the feeds.”

Exegy’s data feed handlers are used by applications at the front end of an electronic trading platform, such as strategy engines, smart order routers that might run an agency business inside a large bank, or tick capture engines that will load historical tick databases. The company has been augmenting its core feed handler business with managed services that help companies distribute data throughout the enterprise.

“We’re getting more involved in helping distribute market data through a large enterprise, and along with that comes the need to be able to manage and monitor market data in a much more enterprise fashion,” said Parsons. “To a large financial institution, market data can be their lifeblood, so that must be always on and always accurate.”

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