SR Labs Unveils Low-Bandwidth Feed to Reach Users Outside Financial Hubs

The compressed feed is part of SR Labs' SuperFeed product line, which is designed to support electronic trading applications that consume direct feeds. Customers' decisions when buying datafeeds are often driven by the amount of bandwidth they can get, says Ian McIntyre, SR Labs' chief operating officer for Europe, adding that customers of the vendor's SuperFeed consolidated feed are usually located in the main datacenters around traditional financial centers with access to high-bandwidth networks.

"Our overall customer base has been a lot of the banks, the bigger hedge funds and customers that tend to run more of a front-office real-time feed. SuperFeed fits nicely into that.... [But] as soon as you get into anywhere outside of the main cities, networking gets really expensive," McIntyre says.

The Compressed Data Feed is targeted at new customers who want to consume low-latency data through lower-bandwidth connectivity, including cloud and internet solutions. To do this, SR Labs is using hardware messaging appliance vendor Solace Systems' Message Router Appliances, which allow the vendor to deliver "the same product, but using just north of 80 percent less bandwidth," he says.

SR Labs has an informal relationship with Solace based on both parties' participation in OpenMAMA─an open-source project promoting the OpenMAMA messaging layer as a way for financial services firms to move more freely between different market data technology and content providers. "We have some joint customers, and some have sponsored us to work together. Through that process, we've long since identified that this would be a project that we wanted to do. We did the usual vendor selection process, we even looked at building this ourselves, but basically Solace turned out to be the best solution, and that's why we selected them," McIntyre says.

The compressed feed fits into SR Labs' general product development plans for the next 12 months to help customers reduce the cost of their footprint and infrastructure, he says, adding that while not a space SR Labs has operated in before, internet-based feeds are "a natural area for us to grow into.... It seems like an obvious extension of what we're doing. We know through sales opportunities that there are plenty of customers using that style of connectivity, and certainly customers outside of the main hubs."

The vendor is noticing more customers using datafeeds over the internet as a much cheaper alternative to leased lines, McIntyre says. "We've experienced this in places like Portugal, for example, and even in some German cities outside of Frankfurt... getting leased lines can be very pricey," which has proved to be an issue for the vendor over time. "We get these opportunities where customers are interested in the product that we have and its normalization qualities, but as soon as they start to look at how much network bandwidth they would need, it becomes an issue. What we've done is keep all the similar qualities about SuperFeed, but fit the Solace appliance into the environment to provide a compressed version of the product, with the goal being to expand our addressable market and be able to service customers in those other locations and over the internet where previously we wouldn't have been able to do that," he says.

The primary aim of the Compressed Data Feed is to "touch customers that wouldn't have normally used or thought about us before," McIntyre says, adding that SR Labs has embarked on "aggressively recruiting" sales and pre sales staff to achieve this-primarily in the US, though the vendor is also looking to hire additional staff in Europe.