AFTAs 2020: Best New Technology Introduced Over the Last 12 Months (Infrastructure)—Xignite

Web services data provider Xignite captured the AFTAs judges’ attention on the infrastructure front with its release of Xignite Enterprise Microservices in July 2020, a suite of cloud-based microservices for data management, storage and distribution in the cloud, designed to help financial firms migrate from monolithic legacy data architectures to more agile and less expensive cloud services and data sources.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company originally began using microservices—which now cover real-time data, optimization, entitlements and usage monitoring, a data lake, reference data, historical data, and fundamental data—to support its own data management activities as it needed to grow and scale its services, but this year began offering them to clients.

“Firms are looking for a complete solution for managing market data in the cloud, end-to-end, that can be deployed as a suite of loosely coupled capabilities, without having to integrate different services,” says Xignite founder and CEO Stephane Dubois.

Now, as the vendor rolls them out more broadly, it is already planning to add new datasets and data sources, such as reference data and fundamental data, so that clients can optimize their data sourcing from multiple vendors individually, as well as across multiple vendors providing similar services, Dubois says.

For its Xignite Real-Time Microservice, the vendor is working on a feed handler for low-latency data provider QuantHouse in addition to existing sources—SIX, FactSet, Vela, Nasdaq and CBOE—to support firms wanting to deploy real-time architectures in the cloud, and envisages also building a feed handler for Refinitiv’s real-time data feed in the not-too-distant-future. Dubois says the vendor can build new handlers quickly as dictated by customer demand. When that happens, “that one will represent a big opportunity for us,” to engage with Refinitiv’s large client base, he says.

Xignite has already added extra functionality into the core platform underlying the microservices to allow firms to load back-office files and create a universe of instruments to ensure accurate and complete datasets. “If people just pull data in a disorganized fashion, they get gaps in the data. But by creating a universe, you don’t get those gaps,” Dubois says.

Next, the vendor plans to expand some features of existing microservices to create new, standalone services, such as a full data dictionary microservice, and separate microservices covering data lineage and usage tracking. These are on Xignite’s roadmap for 2021, Dubois says.