Thomson Reuters Preps Elektron Stream

Elektron leverages the vendor's direct feeds infrastructure, its network of hosted service centers in Savvis datacenters, and a new global distribution layer based on its RMDS data platform, with additional features to support private messaging streams, advanced publishing capabilities, and a new messaging structure. Terry Roche, global head of information management solutions at Thomson Reuters, says the vendor evaluated different technologies to provide this capability, and conducted a bake-off, but settled on its own platform based on performance, cost of ownership and security.

"Since our infrastructure is another layer of RMDS-now called The Enterprise Platform-we can deliver peer-to-peer communication between private end-points, and since that's a private channel, you can use it to send order messages or complex data representations-so we think it will also enable people to create unique instruments and generate liquidity," he says. "Today's infrastructure is stateless-or 'fire-and-forget.' The introduction of private streams creates the ability for more secure connections with reliability in a secure, professionally managed global cloud," he adds.

"Our existing distribution infrastructure is IDN (Integrated Data Network), which has been in place for some time, and uses a hub-and-spoke model, where we collect data in one place, aggregate and normalize it centrally, then distribute it to the market," Roche says. "But today, with the predominance of machine-based trading, moving to next-generation capabilities is a requirement, and Elektron will allow us to grow and integrate data more dynamically in a fundamentally different manner. It's like having a highway, with on-ramps and off-ramps all the way along for data capture and consumption to and from various destinations."

Although he declines to give specific latency figures, Roche says this will enable the vendor to deliver a 20-fold improvement in the time taken to provide data to firms located in proximity to data sources, compared to its existing model.

Roche says Elektron will deliver both IDN-style messages and a new data model containing more fields and capabilities over the same infrastructure, adding that, over time, the vendor will migrate all messages to the Elektron model, which will further improve the efficiency of data distribution over the network.

Max Bowie