Google and Exegy
Posted by Rod Arbaugh on Wed, Aug 17, 2011
The recent announcement of Google’s bid for Motorola Mobility Holdings has brought forth a lot of discussion in the press about the strategic reasons behind this merger.
At Exegy, our attention is drawn to two themes that seem to be prominent in Google’s strategy. First, Google will tightly integrate the Android software application with the hardware platform of Motorola. This is the tactic that has been deployed so successfully by the Apple iPhone product. This “win” for the tight integration of a software application with a proprietary hardware platform, the appliance approach, reflects our own implementation of our solution to processing market data.
In the financial vertical, legacy software vendors supply solutions that run on commodity servers. These systems are generally scaled horizontally to meet the demand to process the ever-rising amount of market data. This adds management complexity and latency to the solution. We routinely visit prospects that have their incumbent ticker plant solution running on hundreds of servers. If market data rates were to double from here, they tell us they would have to double the size of their deployments.
The legacy vendor response is to deliver better software running on faster commodity servers and this does provide an incremental improvement. But the limits of the commodity platform do not allow a paradigm shift in performance and is very expensive to provision and maintain.
At Exegy, we build our ticker plant with one goal – to be the lowest latency ticker plant in the market across the use cases most meaningful to our clients. The Exegy “secret sauce” is simply to offer the best integration of the best ticker plant application on a hardware platform custom built to do one thing – process market data. And we support our product offering with an approach to managed service that is the best in the business.
The second theme that caught our eye was the speculation that Google values the Motorola intellectual property portfolio. We appreciate that reasoning, as well. At Exegy, we have been actively protecting and expanding our intellectual property portfolio for more than ten years. As of August 2011, we hold 15 patents with 23 applications pending in the United States and we routinely make similar filings in Europe and Asia. Many of these patents address the use of FPGAs and other hardware accelerated devices in the financial markets. We like to tell clients that the Exegy solution is built upon Exegy proprietary technology.
We won’t speculate on who will win the phone wars but we do appreciate the fact that the two leading contenders have both adopted the integrated appliance approach. We cheer them both on, as long as they don’t decide to colocate their mobile devices at exchange trading venues to process market data.