Wombat Releases Feed Handler for Bloomberg B-Pipe; Available Now for Wombat Platform and Other Widely Used Market Data Systems

Business Wire, March 13, 2006

NEW YORK -- Wombat Financial Software today announced the general availability of their feed handler for Bloomberg's B-Pipe data feed. Customers can now deploy Wombat's feed handler for this widely anticipated real time data feed to quickly integrate it with their own applications using Wombat's innovative market data distribution system, the Wombat Platform, as well as other widely used market data platforms.

Wombat began development of this product in March 2005. It has been in active testing for six months, and Wombat is currently engaged in integration testing with multiple clients in the Europe and the US. The product is being announced in the wake of Wombat's annual user conference in Lake Tahoe last week, where industry leaders from the across the brokerage and hedge fund community gathered to discuss emerging trends and technologies in the market data arena.

Data Vendor Independence

The Wombat Platform has emerged as the preferred market data platform in the high frequency trading market, having amassed a client list that includes seven of the world's ten largest investment banks and a product portfolio capable of connecting customers directly to the world's trading markets. The company is also seeing increasing demand for its vendor feed integration solutions, particularly due to its position as a technology company unconflicted by any data feed offer of its own. Bloomberg Professional customers can now leverage Wombat to integrate the Bloomberg data they've come to know and trust in their business applications, from risk management and position keeping to automated trading and order management.

"There is a real buzz in the market at the prospect of pushing Bloomberg data into applications," commented Ron Verstappen, Wombat's CEO. "The emergence of new vendor feed products is bringing fresh competition to the market which can only be good for the customer."

Multi Platform Support

What many feel is most remarkable about Wombat's high speed feed handler products is their modular architecture, which allows Wombat to deploy each new feed handler across multiple market data platforms at once. The B-Pipe handler, for example, is currently being implemented with the Wombat Platform and with two other commonly used market data systems. Wombat feed handlers integrate with each platform's data entitlements tools, such, allowing for necessary access control and reporting.

Competition and Regulatory Compliance

Behind this demand lies a combination of interest in competitive data feed alternatives and the need to comply with emerging market regulations. Reg NMS in the US and MiFID in Europe both stipulate that broker dealers must provide and provide evidence of "best execution" for their customers. The availability of a high quality data service like B-Pipe allows customers to implement vendor-level resiliency, switching from one to the other in the case of a delivery failure.

About Wombat Financial Software

Wombat enables limitless connectivity to the global markets through the world's most advanced high speed market data infrastructure, the Wombat Platform. With offices in the US and UK, Wombat software underpins automated market-making systems, electronic-trading floors and tick-capture platforms in financial institutions around the world. The Wombat Platform includes Wombat Feed Handlers, providing sub-millisecond connectivity to more than 80 direct exchange and aggregated vendor feeds; Wombat Transport, enabling high speed, multi-protocol messaging throughout the enterprise; Wombat APIs; and Wombat value added servers such as the Wombat SuperBook virtual order book consolidator and the Wombat DBAC tick-capture adapter. For more information, visit http://www.wombatfs.com.

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