OneMarketData Advances on Cloud Migration and Extends Asset Class Coverage

OneMarketData is in the last leg of its two-year migration project to deploy its data solutions on the cloud.   

The vendor’s two offerings, OneTick, an enterprise platform for managing and analysing tick data, and Tick Data, a service for historical, intraday, and time series data, will be made fully available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the end of the year. OneMarketData is currently building out its real-time data feed and processing capabilities—which currently supports equities, futures, and options—using the cloud architecture.

Users can access the data feeds through a deployed platform, as a managed service, a proprietary GUI for querying the data, or via an application programming interface (API), written in Python.

Jeff Banker, senior vice president of market development, says that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the vendor’s journey to the cloud. As a result of coronavirus-induced market volatility, clients using on-premise data warehouses are struggling to process the influx of real-time and historical data, let alone conduct complex calculations using the data.

“During Covid, we saw volatility go up by about 140%, and it is now running about 20% higher than pre-Covid [in] February of 2020. In terms of just data, if you’re looking at NYSE, it took about two terabytes to store 30 days’ worth of data. So, if you are running your own data center, what we found, and what our clients found, after the initial Covid shock is that their infrastructure wasn’t scalable [and] that there were supply chain issues and remote device issues due to shutdowns,” says Banker.

The OneTick platform collects and reads data from vendors such as Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Wombat, ICE, and Morningstar. It logs the data within the centralized system and allows clients to analyze it in real time or on a historical basis for market surveillance, trading, transaction cost analysis, research, or processing order books.

Although OneMarketData’s cloud journey began more than 18 months ago, the planning phase stretches back much further. Banker says the idea sprouted when the firm acquired Tick Data in 2015, which, at the time, had already been running its entire infrastructure and data files on AWS.

“When we bought the company, it became obvious to us at the time that there was some benefits and practical metrics that would serve us well in terms of [cloud] conversion. So, we slowly started the process of aggregating all our data in AWS, then testing our software in AWS, our security processes, and so forth. So, it has been an optimization journey,” he says.

Prior to the migration, OneMarketData ran its data, servers, and solution through Equinix’s NY4 or NY2 co-location centers, or at private cloud facilities. When the firm bought Tick Data, it integrated the acquired data feed into OneTick, making both services available on one platform, while transitioning to the public cloud.

While it won’t be finalized until the end of the year, Banker says the process won’t end there. The company will have to keep pace with the growing, innovative nature of cloud technology and doing business from inside one. 

“It’s a constant analysis and effort to ensure that we are optimized in terms of our cost and infrastructure, as wells as our services in terms of their performance,” he says. “ So it’s really a never-ending process and just like it would be if you had your own infrastructure, servers, and storage, you’re continuously tweaking it to try and yield the most amount of benefit out of your cost.”

Over the next few months, the vendor will also extend its asset class coverage to include more over-the-counter (OTC) data, as well as fixed-income and FX analytics. The firm is in the process of negotiating terms with several data providers, including a mixture of the “usual suspects,” Banker says, and smaller, less obvious vendors.

There are some content sets that are just required by the market, but the company is also trying to “be creative” with where it can source other, unique content sets, he adds. 

The firm’s aim is to roll out the first batch of data feeds globally by autumn, with later services arriving in the final quarter of the year.