Savvis Signs FTEN for DDU Service

NEW YORK—Clients of direct market access (DMA) technology provider FTEN have gone live with Data Delivery Utility (DDU), the direct feed utility from Savvis and HyperFeed Technologies, in a move that will also allow the DMA vendor to expand its product coverage from equities into options and international markets.

FTEN provides white-labeled versions of its DirectXchange DMA platform to clearing firms and broker-dealers to make available to their buy-side client base. FTEN chief operating officer (COO) Gary Lafever says three of the vendor’s clearing firm clients went into live production a month ago using a feed of exchange data from DDU.

DirectXchange is a thin-client application written in C++ that runs on Intel chip-based servers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. It’s hosted remotely at a data center owned by the Inet ECN, where FTEN leases space.

The DDU feed provides quote and trade data from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the American Stock Exchange (Amex) and Nasdaq as well as order book data from the Inet, Arca and Brut ECNs.

Matt Fox, vice president and general manager of financial services at Savvis in New York, says a utility like DDU is for firms that want to sidestep the cost of installing their own ticker plant. Savvis began testing the DDU feed with FTEN around six months ago, Fox says.

Savvis now has approximately 10 clients of DDU, which is short of the 150 firms that were identified by Savvis and HyperFeed as potential users when DDU launched last year. However, Fox says Savvis is "very pleased" with acceptance to date, and has many more firms either in implementation or discussing it.

Lafever says using DDU will also enable the vendor to add options trading capability, for cross-asset trading, which it is testing now and is due to be available some time in the third quarter.