Signal Centre Integrates Push Technology for Data Management

Signal Centre, a trade idea platform for foreign exchange, commodities, stock indices, equities, and cryptocurrencies, is deploying Push Technology’s Diffusion Intelligent Data Platform to manage increased customer demand at faster speeds.

London-based Signal Centre delivers trade ideas to global fund managers, hedge funds, and central banks, by monitoring and managing trades live during the European trading day, which requires a data management platform to reliably deliver information to clients.  

Signal Centre managing director Steve O’Hare says the idea platform was experiencing significant problems when it came to scalability of the database and that publishing trade ideas was taking up to seven minutes, but rather than rebuilding the platform, they integrated Diffusion Intelligent Data Platform, a real-time data streaming and messaging platform, for faster speeds.

“What we were finding was [as] more clients that accessed our website and used our services online, it was having a huge impact on the database, which was causing slowdowns in getting information out to customers,” he says. “The main reason for this was that the platform itself was talking directly to the database and this was causing a bottleneck in a number of areas and we needed to address this.”

Push Technology’s proprietary delta data streaming software reduces the amount of data sent and shrinks bandwidth by 90 percent, which improved Signal Centre’s latency and connectivity issues. 

Sean Bowen, Push Technology CEO, says his company’s aim is to solve traditional challenges of internet and messaging products such as bandwidth fluctuations and spotty connections that occur on big, shared networks, as well as taking the pressure off the back-end systems designed for minimal network connections. 

“We built Diffusion to take away the challenges of connecting over the internet and take the pressure away from the back-end systems,” he says. “We built a cache inside the product, so now when Signal Centre customers access the applications they are connecting to us, and we’re taking all the load—the back-end system doesn’t need to take the load. We have a single connection to the back-end database, requesting and getting information from it. And like I say, we handle all the connections as well as the flow of data.”

O’Hare says clients now receive trade ideas a second after trades are published.

The Push Technology and Signal Centre partnership is part of a wider strategy. Diffusion was first being deployed on Signal Centre’s widget application, and O’Hare says they anticipate integrating the software in Signal Centre’s Excel product in the near future.