Adaptive’s Aeron goes live on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Bespoke trading platform provider Adaptive Financial Consulting has made its open-source suite of low-latency messaging tools, Aeron, available through Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace, following similar partnerships with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Marketplaces, or platforms that offer a curated mix of internal and third-party applications and datasets, have become a staple in financial workflows. In addition to those offered by the cloud providers, S&P Global unveiled its own in 2020, while Deutsche Börse revealed plans for a data marketplace in April, with Northern Trust following the same route in May. As another example, FactSet launched its Open:FactSet Marketplace, while it also contributes to Snowflake’s Data Marketplace.

The appeal of marketplace offerings is not just their convenience and centralization, but these partnerships also allow client firms to use their committed spend to the marketplace operator to consume these additional third-party services at a significantly lower cost than list price. And as cloud becomes financial firms’ leading method for consuming and storing data and analytics, running calculations, and ultimately low-latency trading, end-users can get these third-party services up and running in their preferred cloud environments right off the bat via the cloud providers’ marketplaces.

“We’ve done AWS, then we did Google, now we’ve done Azure,” Matt Barrett, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive, tells WatersTechnology. “What that should tell you is that behind each of those is a significant financial services firm that has a strong account management relationship with the cloud provider in question, saying, ‘We want to give Adaptive money for Aeron to run on your cloud. Make it possible for us.’”

Adaptive acquired Aeron through its 2022 purchase of low-latency trading tech software company Real Logic and has since launched the subscription-based Aeron Premium for business and enterprise use. Primarily, developers use Aeron to build bits and pieces of trading systems related to low-level messaging and connectivity to other systems. The suite of technologies also features Aeron Cluster, which sits on top of the messaging component and provides a resiliency model that’s resistant to outages, crashes, and data losses.

Though Aeron has become Adaptive’s flagship offering, it’s also the home of Hydra, a technical accelerator for building single-dealer platforms, matching engines, and execution venues for clients in financial services, including exchanges, banks, and investment managers. Prior to the acquisition, Adaptive had chosen Real Logic’s Aeron to underpin Hydra’s architecture.

One such example is the former ErisX, which approached Adaptive in 2019 to deploy the crypto exchange’s new matching engine by the end of the year. Adaptive built ErisX, a trading system, which the exchange continued to build upon independently until it was acquired by Cboe in 2021, becoming Cboe Digital. The options exchange announced plans earlier this year to shut down Cboe Digital in Q3. 

Barrett says that a main focus for this year into 2025 will be making Hydra easier to use and more consumable by the wider market. He says that most of the clients that are building on Hydra today have done so through professional services engagement—active consulting and initial management—alongside Adaptive. But Barrett’s vision for Hydra and his clients is that firms seeking these bespoke platforms won’t need any involvement from Adaptive at all.

“[We’ll be] sort of decomposing Hydra so that it can be more easily used by people just picking it up directly. Coming to the website, reading documentation, seeing videos, going to conferences, developing on it themselves directly on top of Hydra, deploying into the cloud,” Barrett says. “That’s a big push for us.”