29West Preps Gateway Messaging Upgrade

Gateway, which 29West originally rolled out five years ago and has since incorporated into its core messaging software products, allows firms to connect "islands" of multicast messaging networks in different regions, so that people and applications in multiple market centers can subscribe to and share the same information regardless of its source location.

The product would be most valuable to firms running global smart order-routing or position-keeping systems that need to stay in synch with each other internationally, says Mark Mahowald, senior vice president and general manager of Informatica's messaging business and former chief executive of 29West. As a result, the biggest demand for Gateway comes from large global firms, he adds.

However, connecting these multicast islands in different locations means that the Gateway connection itself must be extremely reliable in order to ensure synchronicity between different applications. Therefore, the upgrades comprise features for failover, persistence and message queuing, including multi-hop forwarding and path redundancy, which allows messages to circumvent any failure of direct messaging links-or of a specific network provider-between different locations.

Keeping Pace with Evolution

Mahowald says the enhancements to Gateway are designed to keep it up-to-date with the evolution of the vendor's other products that incorporate it-for example, by also adding support for intelligent load balancing to its Ultra Messaging with Queuing product, which incorporates the Gateway component, as do 29West's Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise and its Latency Busters Messaging platforms.

"If an FX trader is sending an order for, say, a futures contract out to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, they may have multiple gateways to connect to the exchange," says Jamil Ahmed, pre-sales engineer at 29West in London. "They can use queuing to help the application coordinate which gateway will process the order, therefore balancing the load across the available gateways."

Mahowald says the addition of queuing capabilities enables the vendor to compete with a broader range of messaging providers, and that other enhancements such as the introduction of its JMS (Java Message Service) application program interface earlier this year (IMD, Feb. 8) make it easier to integrate the vendor's messaging, whereas each product currently has separate APIs. The JMS API was tested internally for two months, and is now in early adoption at an unnamed global bank, Ahmed says.

Farah Khalique with Max Bowie