The high-speed financial services industry (FSI) can’t deal in seconds or even milliseconds. That would be far too slow. Processing a trade in one second would be like taking two weeks off, not telling anybody, and not touching your email. When dealing with stock prices that fluctuate in real time, any delay can mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. This means the trades that really matter in the financial services world need to move in one millionth of a second (10-6) and technology “pipes” need to carry an incredible amount of data.
Speed is All that Matters
For Citihub, an FSI IT provider, performance is absolutely paramount for their clients. If it’s faster, Citihub wants it because their customers need it. If technology isn’t even a thousandth of a second faster than the latest version, they don’t want to hear about it. They want to know how quickly a message can get from point to point, whether it’s trades, market data, or any piece of useful financial information. Bottom line: it needs to travel unnaturally fast.
Citihub provides consulting services and technology infrastructure to serve their clients in technically complex and business critical environments. Citihub searched for a faster messaging solution for their clients’ high-volume, low-latency trading needs and that search ended with TIBCO.
“Within the financial enterprise, performance is absolutely paramount. It needs to be going fast. TIBCO FTL performed by far and away faster than anything else we’d ever tested before. We broke a world record in the speed we could get messages from A to B within the same computer.”
– Ben Newton, Lead Consultant, High Performance Trading, Citihub
Higher Speed = Higher Volume = Higher Revenue
For Citihub, speed is essential to maximize revenue in any environment where their clients have high volumes of trades and corresponding data. After a hedge fund client requested more speed and lower latency, Citihub chose TIBCO’s Faster Than Light (FTL) Messaging. Their TIBCO solution combines a switch with messaging infrastructure, something never done before. The resulting solution broke world records for messaging speed. TIBCO FTL proved itself not only to be the fastest messaging solution, but gave Citihub the added value of very mature functionality that separates administrative and development tasks.
“So, I think the hunt for higher performance is a constant evolution. Combining a switch with a messaging infrastructure is truly innovative. Combining those two things has never been done before.”
– Ben Newton, Lead Consultant, High Performance Trading, Citihub
With Innovation Comes World Record-Breaking Speed
TIBCO FTL at Citihub cuts latency significantly by putting multiple functions on a single device. This provides Citihub with the innovative combination of a fully manageable, small footprint, ultra-fast device that will drive many new applications in the future. For their clients, Citihub offers a solution with excellent total cost of ownership, high scalability and world record performance characteristics.
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