With support for many different kinds of data distribution in a compact, cost-effective platform, Solace PubSub+ Platform is the ideal foundation for OpenMAMA-based market data distribution systems. Solace can efficiently route real-time information between market data feeds and other components responsible for bridging to legacy environments like RMDS and Wombat, last value caching and connectivity to Excel spreadsheets. Fully integrated WAN and Web messaging capabilities make it easy to get market data to traders around the world whether they’re at a desk or on the go.
Introduction to OpenMAMA
For investment banks, distributing market data to traders is an expensive proposition – typically their #2 cost center after salaries. It takes an integrated set of multi-tiered platforms to handle all of the incoming feeds they buy, and more technology to efficiently distribute relevant data to traders with different needs, in different locations, and connected by different kinds of networks and devices.To handle the scale of high-volume feeds and capacity plan for unpredictable bursts of traffic, firms must scale their systems with hundreds or even thousands of servers. And through all this investment, firms are unable to innovate or differentiate themselves because market data vendors maintain tight control over their platform’s current functionality and roadmap.
OpenMAMA aims to change all that by providing an open, standardized API and associated data format. A common messaging API drives down development time by eliminating the need to code to a variety of vendor APIs, and gives developers the freedom to create innovative services that improve the customer experience. Similarly, an open data model means developers don’t need to learn how to work with many data types, or accommodate variations between data sources.
OpenMAMA gives investment banks control over their market data distribution infrastructure, eliminating the vendor lockin they’re used to as well as the “employee lockin” common with homegrown solutions. It’s a mature open source platform that’s supported by vendors that provide expert support and specialized solutions for various market data distribution functions. This means firms can use best-of-breed technologies for each function and choose from different options such as inline or parallel caching, hosted or on-premise deployment and a variety of entitlement models. Here is a repository of third party plugins for OpenMAMA.
Solace’s OpenMAMA Solution
Here are some of the key reasons Solace’s platform makes an excellent data distribution element of an OpenMAMA-based market data distribution system.
- No vendor lock-in
- Ability to innovate with new, complex data types for internally-generated prices
- Ability to change data without needing to restart your infrastructure, as is required by TREP
- Smaller, more cost-effective, easier to manage data distribution infrastructure
- No additional cost to carry as many symbols as you like of your own internally-generated pricing or external, vendor pricing
- Higher performance, better latency predictability
- Independence between data distribution technology and data providers
- Simple integration into Big Data and analytics infrastructures
Architecture Comparison
Before OpenMAMA
Without the common API OpenMAMA provides, firms are forced to deploy separate platforms and there’s no common way to access market data. Applications are coded against multiple APIs and have to convert data models to share information, which leads to very high maintenance costs. Extending the environment over wide area networks is a separate problem that introduces additional complexity.
Conversion to OpenMAMA API
The first step in implementing OpenMAMA is rationalizing the variety of APIs and using a centralized data distribution broker such as Solace to transport data between the various platforms.
This gives applications unified access to market data, and from this point no code changes are required to update the system – administrators can manage the system through configuration settings.
After
The final step is to use Solace’s platform to handle all OpenMAMA-based data distribution, eliminating the architectural and operational complexity of platform-specific distribution and fanout functionality. This includes distribution over the WAN and to web and mobile apps, and comes with the many advantages of Solace’s platform such as low, consistent latency, superior robustness and unified monitoring and management. Solace can directly accept external feeds such as BPipe, Reuters Eikon, SuperFeed, MarketPrizm and Quanthouse, either natively or via bridges.
OpenMAMA Case Study
One of the world’s leading investment banks, with over 5,000 consumers of market data around the world, is using Solace PubSub+ Event Broker to replace several market data platforms including RMDS with OpenMAMA.
Objectives
- They wanted to unify their data access and eliminate the mess of API wrappers that had grown increasingly complex over time, while isolating their APIs from market data vendors so they could more easily switch data sources if they wanted to.
- On the front end, they wanted to reduce their exposure to vendor-controlled feature decisions. As an example, one feed vendor was eliminating support for multicast-based cache, and they worried about what might be next.
- Another goal was to decouple their data from their technology so they could more easily implement new tools and technologies.
- Finally, they wanted to update an increasingly obsolete flat key/value pair-based data model to something that met modern requirements such as yield curves and orderbooks.
Benefits
- They reduced the footprint of their entire market data system to just 104 rack units. That includes distribution around the world, development and production environments, and all components including bridges, entitlement systems and monitoring.
- By implementing Solace and OpenMAMA they have successfully decoupled internal data from distribution technology and made all of their feeds accessible through the shared OpenMAMA API.
- They have given themselves the ability to adapt over time with OpenMAMA’s open API and capacity headroom to route millions of messages per second to 81,000 users.