Exegy, a provider of hardware-accelerated market data appliances, has launched an embedded market data product that enables rapid deployment of new applications in globally distributed data centers.
The Exegy TAP allows raw market data feeds to be consumed and processed on the same server that hosts trading applications.

By providing compatibility with its existing API, Exegy enables users to rapidly deploy applications currently leveraging an Exegy Ticker Plant or Market Data System to a new site using TAP with no application changes.

“In addition to the impressive latency performance, application portability was one of the most well-received features during our early access engagements with customers,” said Exegy vice president of product management David Taylor. “Our customers were exceedingly pleased that they could simply drop an existing application binary on a server with TAP installed and run.”

As an embedded ticker plant, TAP utilizes a subset of the computing and memory resources on a server to normalize the market data and deliver subscribed-to updates to applications written to the Exegy Client API (XCAPI).

According to Exegy, the initial software version of TAP achieves low single-digit microsecond latency performance. The forthcoming hardware-accelerated version of TAP improves on that performance and reduces consumption of host server computing resources.

“The hardware-accelerated TAP leverages proven technology from our appliances in order to minimize host resource consumption and to deliver the lowest, most consistent latency performance possible,” said Taylor. “The hardware-accelerated TAP utilizes an Exegy-supplied network interface card that includes Exegy’s market data hardware logic.”

With the introduction of an embedded market data product, Exegy broadens the addressable market for its products and services. “TAP allows us to more efficiently meet the needs of our customers who want to deploy a few applications that require data from a limited number of feeds local to the datacenter,” said Exegy CEO James O’Donnell.

In some cases, particularly in North American equities and options, the number of feeds required by an application can quickly exceed the processing capacity of a commodity server. For these use cases, Exegy offers a line of appliances that provide low-latency normalization and distribution of market data to many applications via Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

“When the embedded model makes sense, TAP provides a fast, efficient solution with the same Exegy API and managed service experience,” O’Donnell said. “When customers need to scale up and the embedded model becomes impractical, our hardware-accelerated appliances provide an unparalleled combination of speed, capacity, and features.”

With its installed base of Exegy Ticker Plant and Market Data System appliances in North America and the United Kingdom, Exegy is expecting TAP to expand its presence in continental Europe and Asian markets, as well as geographically distributed markets such as foreign exchange.