Exegy Market Data Blog

Low Latency – Our Only Goal

We received several calls from friends about a comment we made in our recent blog, Google and Exegy.

In that piece, Rod Arbaugh, our COO, wrote “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.”
As many of you know, we are in the market presenting solutions to you that serve a wide range of needs in the enterprise – many of these uses are not particularly latency sensitive. Why then is our singular focus to build the lowest latency ticker plant?

We do this for the same reason the major auto manufacturers build F-1 race cars.  In designing to the most demanding performance standards, you learn a lot about how to produce a better product for a much broader set of users.
In building every product around our best performing ticker plant, we confirm a corporate culture that believes LATENCY MATTERS.  Sometimes, our customers value lower latency in solutions that are not wholly latency sensitive.  But, more often than not, our ability to process large amounts of data very efficiently at very low latencies supports other product features that our clients prize very highly.

A good example of this is the distribution of market data throughout the enterprise.  Exegy entered this business in the spring of 2011 and promised our clients a better way to distribute market data to hundreds of users.  The many advantages of our low latency ticker plant allows us to build enterprise solutions that have very small footprints, very efficient integrations with different distribution technologies (Multicast, Unicast, RDMA) and capacity headroom that legacy solutions cannot offer. 

Building a market leading enterprise solution on a less than market leading ticker plant is a very hard proposition.  At Exegy, we build our enterprise solution on the best performing ticker plant in the business and use the skills we learned in the low latency, hardware accelerated world to further extend the attractiveness of the enterprise solution.

I agree with Rod that our only goal is to build the lowest latency ticker plant.  This enables us to build an array of great products in the market data vertical with features and benefits that our clients value and that our competitors cannot match. Why would anyone try to build a world-class market data company on a less that world class ticker plant?  -seems like Business 101 to us.