IBM WebSphere Products Improve Financial Markets Firms' Ability to Manage Growing Market Data Volumes and Speeds

Market Wire, November, 2007

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of two new IBM WebSphere Software products, each based on innovative technology from IBM labs, that enable financial markets firms to dramatically enhance the management of their complex financial market data requirements.

"The new IBM WebSphere Software combines best-of-breed performance in its ability to process millions of messages per second with latency measured in microseconds, along with unbeatable flexibility, resiliency and scalability," said Chae An, vice president, financial sector industry solutions, IBM Software Group.

The launch of IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging Version 2.0 represents a significant expansion of the capability of IBM's WebSphere MQ family. WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging is the high-performance messaging component of WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets which is now available for the first time as a separate product. Its introduction demonstrates IBM's commitment to providing innovative solutions to help address the explosion of data volumes across financial markets high velocity trading and analytic environments.

IBM WebSphere Front Office for Financial Markets Version 2.0 is an enhanced version of IBM's high-speed market data delivery platform. It offers improved performance, capabilities, and simplification. WebSphere Front Office enables financial markets firms to improve the management of their complex financial market data requirements across the enterprise.

Reuters is one IBM Business Partner that has already sought to harness the power of IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging. Reuters recently announced the development of a new distribution component for their premier Market Data System, RMDS 6, the Multicast Distributor (MCD). The MCD will harness the power of IBM's Low Latency Messaging technology, and is designed as an ultra low latency device to enable the distribution of vast amounts of data from RMDS to thousands of client applications.

"We are pleased to be able to extend our multicast offering for RMDS 6 through our partnership with IBM. We have been working closely with IBM since our joint announcement earlier this year, and have been very pleased with the performance and new capabilities that have been added during the past few months. The performance and interoperability of WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging will give our clients even more messaging choices for RMDS 6 at greater speed than ever," said Peter Moss, Global Head of Enterprise Solutions, Reuters. "For the first time developers will be able to build new applications using Reuters Foundation API (RFA) on top of IBM messaging software to access content from RMDS 6 and to distribute it into other parts of their organizations. This is another example of our continuous commitment to put customers first. We look forward to working closely with IBM as they continue to enhance WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging and extending their great investment to our clients in other Reuter's systems."

WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging extends the WebSphere MQ messaging family as an additional transport designed for low latency, high-throughput message delivery. It adds to an expanding suite of transport protocols to address a wide range of messaging needs.

WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging has demonstrated very high throughput, one-to-many multicast messaging, which can deliver approximately one million 120-byte messages per second on Ethernet, close to three million 120-byte messages per second on InfiniBand, and more than 8 million smaller messages per second, all on common x86 servers. Testing has also measured very low latency of 30 microseconds for 120 byte messages delivered at 10,000 messages per second on InfiniBand or 61 microseconds on Ethernet (1)

IBM worked closely with Voltaire to achieve particularly outstanding results on Infiniband. Voltaire's MCE (Multicast Engine Libraries) and multi-service director-class Infiniband switches were shown to substantially reduce end-to-end application latency as well as gain linear scalability. The combination of WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging and Voltaire Infiniband can provide a new standard to address higher market data and trading volumes. Patrick Guay, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Voltaire, said: "In financial markets, microseconds can make the difference. We are pleased to be working with IBM to offer significantly higher throughput and significantly lower latency as proven by our performance tests."

In addition to pure speed and throughput, WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging V2.0 includes:

--  High speed, point-to-point communications using user datagram protocol
    (UDP) with positive or negative feedback reliability
--  Reliable unicast, which provides high speed point-to-point messaging
    over TCP
--  Flexible, fine-grained message filtering, traffic rate and congestion
    control, and high availability stream failover
--  Methods to monitor health and statistics, including latency, for both
    multicast and unicast
--  Support for a wide variety of platforms including Linux, Windows, and
    Solaris