Options IT Clients Get Access to Activ

Clients of infrastructure-as-a-service provider Options IT can now access consolidated global market data and feed handlers from Activ Financial within their managed infrastructures, as a result of a deal agreed between the two vendors last week.

Under the agreement, the two have connected their data networks, allowing Options IT to permission clients of its Pipe Velocity hosted infrastructure for low-latency trading to subscribe to and capture data from Activ's ActivFeed low-latency consolidated datafeed.

"We have connections to all Activ's ticker plants around the world... so anyone who has infrastructure with us has an instant option for a consolidated pricing feed... or to access Activ's direct feed handlers running on our ultra-low-latency infrastructure that offers higher performance than their own," says Options IT chief executive Nigel Kneafsey.

Scott Hall, managing director of sales for the Americas at Activ, says the option should particularly appeal to small- and medium-size firms that outsource their infrastructure management but want access to data from additional markets that Options IT may not have available, or existing ActivFeed clients that want to outsource management of some applications.

The vendors had previously provided the integrated service to clients on an ad hoc basis, and Activ already uses Options IT to provide connectivity to some of the raw datafeeds that Activ consolidates. Hall says that while the vendor's locations are largely overlapping, there are some instances where each has access to data that the other does not. "We have pipes to some locations that Options IT doesn't have, and they have some that we don't have," he says.

"We are trying to bring as many market data and financial application providers as we can into our environment... as part of an ongoing process of enriching our service and making it easy for our clients to access a broad range of data and applications," says Patrick Ruppe, head of marketing at Options IT.

"This is about reaching out to new potential clients via Options IT's ecosystem - it's important for us to join and sell into these types of community," Hall says.