11/12/2006

Andrew Miller, CEO of Arcontech, the supplier of real-time data distribution systems and desktop integration software announced today his prediction of greatly increased revenues from CityVision Excelerator, its flagship product for global real-time data publishing based on Microsoft Excel.

The Excelerator suite allows traders, analysts and other users of market data to publish and exchange data between spreadsheets in true real-time across the globe. According to Miller, it’s like instant messaging with the added ability to manipulate and visualise data in real-time using the full power of Excel.

Following the launch of the latest version in August this year, Excelerator is licensed for use by dozens of firms at thousands of positions globally. It is also ‘white-labelled’ by data vendors as part of their own desk-top offering.

Miller again: “We’re seeing particular interest as a replacement for the excel add-ins typically bundled with vendor platforms, where the user requirement doesn’t extend to a full market data terminal and where expensive exchange data is not business critical. Massive savings and increased flexibility and reliability come from using Excelerator for publishing of internally generated data. Add to this our ability to supplement or replace vendor technology with our global real-time middleware and you have a near perfect scenario – cheaper, faster, better data with full integration with incumbent platforms where required.

“Our unique approach means that there is no faster product for large scale spreadsheet applications. Whilst we support RTD, this is not as fast or feature-rich as our approach and has the disadvantage of incompatibility with earlier versions of Excel, still prevalent in many organisations.”

Excelerator supports pages (including shredding), records, chains and tickers in true real-time, automatically adjusting for chain content and size changes, signaling stale data, source and service failure, so users are aware when data may be suspect. It also has significant advantages over other products in the market place, such as: intelligent traffic management; advanced user interface features, including up/down tick and trend highlighting; true resilience with hot-standby recovery from network failure; and flexible built-in translation between different field naming schemas.

Arcontech will be announcing further ground-breaking enhancements to the product for the New Year.

13/11/2006

Provider of market information services in the finance sector KTS PLC (AIM: KTS) is adding real-time equity prices, news and other company data from Virt-x and Plus Markets to MarketTerminal, its live market data service. Access to information from the additional exchanges will be available on MarketTerminal from early next year at no additional subscription cost to users.

The two exchanges are becoming increasingly established with the UK trading community, and have been added to MarketTerminal to ensure market participants have a complete picture of all trading activity in the London equity markets.

Plus Markets currently trades over 800 small and mid-cap company shares, representing a combined market capitalisation of over £145 billion, while trading on Virt-x, a cross-border trading platform, had a trading turnover of almost £50 billion for pan-European equities in 2005. With the focus of MarketTerminal solely for users working and trading in the UK market, KTS will no longer be providing information from US and other non-London-based exchanges from January 2007.

Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, Chief Executive of KTS PLC, said:

“The London equity markets are changing rapidly, and with the introduction of the new MiFID directive towards the end of next year there will be further acceleration in changing market requirements. The beauty of our technology is that MarketTerminal is a very flexible product which will always keep up with the times and have the content that our clients really need. With the addition of Plus Markets and Virt-x, we believe MarketTerminal will offer the most complete picture of London-traded equities and be the best value product on the market.”

01/11/2006

Arcontech, a leading developer of real-time market data software, has won an award for the most innovative real-time data management solution.

Financial-I magazine, together with leading analyst firms and consultants from the wholesale banking industry, selected Arcontech to receive the award at the Leaders in Innovation Awards on 9 November.

The awards were decided based upon product innovation over the last 12 to 18 months, cost effectiveness of solutions in terms of implementation and deployment, potential business benefits, ease of implementation, and the ability to tackle specific business issues and problems.

Andrew Miller, managing director at Arcontech, said: “Recognition from such a prestigious publication is always welcome, as it proves that the teamwork, hard graft and strategic significance of CityVision StarNet have not gone unnoticed. In this case it is perhaps even more gratifying since we did not make our own entry with over-inflated product puff – the selection was entirely the choice of analysts and other professionals who have experience of best-of-breed products from all quarters.

“The applicability and readiness of CityVision’s innovative data publication, aggregation and controlled re-distribution capabilities in a MiFID context are bound to have been factors in the decision.

This is the second award for Arcontech in 2006, having already won recognition for ‘Networking Initiative of the Year’ at The Banker’s 2006 awards.

01/10/2006

Leading City software specialist upgrades product suite ready for MiFID.

Arcontech – a leading developer of real-time market data software – has today unveiled the latest addition to its cutting edge CityVision product: the StarNet Enterprise Status Navigator.

CityVision, Arcontech’s suite of software components for real-time data publishing, is well established and proven with major City institutions. CityVision’s StarNet components extend the suite to allow financial institutions to connect different networks and the internet to coordinate the immediate, simultaneous and secure transmission of market data between the networks and also internet users. It can deliver millions of messages per second, with latency as low as 45 microseconds.

The new Enterprise Status Navigator provides the IT support team (including outsourced support) with improved visibility of the system’s status, real-time content and usage. It will also support banks’ MiFID implementations (the forthcoming Market in Financial Instruments Directive) by making it far easier for them to trouble-shoot and check service quality when distributing data to numerous institutions simultaneously, rather than via data vendors or exchanges as at present.

Andrew Miller, the managing director of Arcontech, said: “This is an important addition to our CityVision suite, with many of the features coming in response to client feedback. In particular, it will allow our clients’ support teams, including outsourced and offshore support, to pretty much look at anything anytime from anywhere. Coupled with the extensive behind-the-scenes investment in our middleware, it will dramatically increase the effectiveness of support teams, reducing the time for resolving problems.

“The new functionality will also ease location of problems outside the StarNet, highlighting problems with source data, destination systems or the underlying network infrastructure.

“This new product was developed explicitly to support the requirements of MiFID and other large-scale business opportunities for our clients. A central tenet of MiFID is that banks will need to publish pre- and post-trade prices, and prove best execution. To manage this amount of data between multiple organisations banks will need sophisticated tools – and our new Enterprise Status Navigator provides an important component in a plug & play form.”

The new Enterprise Status Navigator provides:

• Reassurance of normal operation by showing the status of every server in a StarNet domain
• Simple drill-down navigation to problem areas to aid trouble-shooting
• Clear ‘traffic light’ indicators of status condition
• Real-time data ‘trace route’ to discover which people and/or applications are using what data at any instant
• Dynamic display of system status and performance for each key component
• User-definable templates and composite displays for individual preferences and scenarios
• All status data available via APIs (Application Program Interface) and SNMP (System Network Management Protocol) methods to allow full integration with 3rd party monitoring systems

08/09/2006

Arcontech, a leading supplier of real-time data distribution systems and desktop integration software has announced a free trial of CityVision JStation, giving access to teletext pages over the internet.

JStation is a browser-delivered ‘thin client’ desktop for real-time market data display. JStation is vendor independent, one of the many feeds it supports is teletext generated from the various TV channels or by other CityVision real-time systems. JStation allows multiple teletext pages to be displayed conveniently in a browser. Colin Bootle, the JStation designer at Arcontech said “This (product) is ideal for sports and betting houses, as there is no longer a need for a separate TV for each page or channel. Instead, an unlimited number of teletext pages can be viewed side-by-side, from multiple sources. There is no need to wait for sub-pages to cycle round – they too can be viewed instantly. Updates are in real-time, so it’s faster than FastText!”

JStation is not limited to teletext. It can display all the data handled by Arcontech’s CityVision – including the major vendors plus internally sourced data. Teletext demonstrates that Arcontech is able to deal with unusual feeds in the same consistent manner that it handles market data feeds. JStation can display pages, quotes, tables etc, whilst CityVision servers provide page building, shredding and calculation from multiple sources.

Traditional market data displays can be tedious to install, configure, maintain, permission and support, as well as expensive. JStation removes these issues – users simply point their browsers at the appropriate website (see trial details below). All configuration and permissioning is done centrally with nothing stored on the user’s machine. The teletext trial gives users permission just to see teletext pages, unaware that other users may have permission to see exchange feeds or other market data.

Maintenance is equally simple – to update all users with the latest version simply update the version on the website. Andrew Miller, managing director at Arcontech added: “JStation is ideal for providing remote and ‘off-floor’ users with a market data display, minimizing deployment and support costs and eliminating high charges for internal data distribution”.

To sign-up for the JStation teletext trial, simply visit Arcontech’s website at http://www.arcontech.com and select “Products” followed by “Live Teletext”.

31/07/2006

Arcontech, a leading supplier of real-time data distribution systems and desktop integration software has announced the latest release of its object oriented ‘add-in’ technology for Microsoft Excel, CityVision Excelerator.

The Excelerator suite allows traders, analysts and other users of market data to receive, manipulate and re-publish data in true real-time, with sophisticated traffic management and user presentation features.

The latest version includes some significant advances over other products in the market place. Amongst these are: intelligent traffic management; advanced user interface features, including up/down tick and trend highlighting; true resilience with hot-standby recovery from network failure; and flexible built-in translation between different field naming schemas.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech said: “Excelerator is one of those great products we’ve had for so long that we almost forget to tell people about it. Built from our core real-time objects, it automatically inherits the incredible reliability and speed of our real-time middleware. Add to this its object oriented approach to Excel and the result is something that outperforms others by a margin”.

Excelerator supports pages (including shredding), records, chains and tickers in true real-time, automatically adjusting for chain content and size changes, signaling stale data, source and service failure, so users are aware when data may be suspect.

A typical application for Excelerator is to provide global capability for data contribution and reception, replacing or augmenting other market data desktops where speed, accuracy and control of data is critical, and where cost and flexibility are key issues. Miller again: “With 100 or so firms using Excelerator, there can be no doubt about its relevance. Firms need to keep their costs and data under control, without losing reliability or flexibility. The fact that Excelerator links seamlessly with CityVision StarNet means that issues of authentication, entitlements, firewalls and proxies, etc are all resolved ‘out of the box’ so implementation can be as fast as the customer can move.”

Excelerator is currently in Beta test in the City and expected to ship in August.

20/06/2006

A major vendor of real-time market data terminal services has gone live with Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet real-time market data aggregator, supporting pan-European data contributions from the investment banking community.

The StarNet system went into production earlier this year and is currently receiving real-time data content from about a dozen banks, primarily fixed-income data. The system is extensible to receive instruments in any asset class, from hundreds of contributors and to provide controlled re-distribution.

This announcement follows Arcontech’s recent success in the ‘networking initiative of the year’ category at The Banker magazine’s technology awards earlier this month.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech said: “We are particularly pleased to be working with another major data vendor handling contributions aggregation. It vindicates our extensive R&D spend and shows that our software is consistently as reliable, flexible and extensible as we designed it to be.”

The contract was awarded after a very thorough and comprehensive proof of concept project, designed to show that Arcontech’s existing product could succeed where the competition had failed. Miller again: “We knew we had a good chance when we were able to deploy, within a few days, a system with all the key features and facilities required. From then the system rolled smoothly into production, with minimal work to achieve integration with the existing ticker plant.”

The CityVision Aggregator installation is exactly the same product that could be installed by others to support pan-European MiFID data aggregation. It can ingest data from many sources and protocols, including spreadsheets, existing de-facto standards and FIX. It also has comprehensive APIs and a full authentication and entitlements system. These, together with its seamless integration with the CityVision StarNet distribution system mean that it is an ideal solution for many MiFID real-time data requirements, from the smallest “one in, one out” to the very largest ticker plant applications.

04/06/2006

Following its successes in the 2004 and 2005 awards, Arcontech’s CityVision real-time market data platform has again been selected in the 2006 honours list, this time in fiercely contested ‘Networking Initiative of the Year’ category.

In the 2004 awards, CityVision won the award for ‘Best Technology to the Sell-Side’, with its Multiple Vendor Contribution System (MVCS). Last year Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet was ‘highly commended’, for its StarNet global inter-networking capabilities.

This year Arcontech’s award winning product is the Multiple Destination Publishing System (MDPS), a radical and innovative development of MVCS. It provides the financial community with fast, flexible and cost-effective publishing of real-time market data to any destination.

MDPS builds on the solid infrastructure technology of CityVision StarNet empowering clients with unprecedented flexibility and dynamicism in their data publishing operations. It is the result of continual improvements, accounting for technological changes, client feedback, regulation and compliance issues. It addresses the increasing demand for low latency, direct market and peer-to-peer publishing in an increasingly quality-conscious and cost-averse market.

“We are delighted to follow the last two years’ awards with this recognition, again in the networking category,” said Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech. “It further endorses our progress towards an enterprise market data platform and acknowledges the hard work and innovation of our developers.

MDPS is lining up to be an important technology to address many of the real-time data requirements of MiFID, the European Market in Financial Instruments Directive. Miller again: “CityVision provides proven product to satisfy three key areas of MiFID: pre-trade pricing; post-trade reporting; and price monitoring for best execution. What ever route firms want to take for publishing, we have the product so they can send and the market can receive”

This is the fourth annual The Banker Technology Awards. The awards recognize best of breed, innovation and success in financial technology. The awards are designed to provide financial institutions and their clients around the world with an objective analysis of the technological expertise that exists within key business areas. The Awards highlights those solutions and projects that have made a real difference over the past 12 months.

Judges for The Banker Technology Awards represent a cross section of financial technology expertise, drawn from consulting firms, investment banks and other specialists.

15/05/2006

KTS PLC, the provider of real-time financial information services, is launching its new PDA all-in-one mobile market data service package at this weekÕs Dealing with Technology (DWT) event in London.

The company will be showcasing the mobile version of its MarketTerminal market data service, aimed at financial market professionals. It is delivered on Hewlett PackardÕs iPAQ hw6515 Mobile Messenger, which comes with a range of high-spec features including full messaging capabilities, email access, GPS navigation and a camera.

KTSÕs package includes the iPAQ Mobile Messenger device free of charge, a relevant data and voice tariff and access to KTSÕs mobile MarketTerminal service. Subscription costs £90 per month, excluding exchange fees and VAT.

DWT is a one-day exhibition and seminar programme for front and middle office banking technology. It is taking place on Wednesday 17 May at the Brewery on LondonÕs Chiswell Street.

The mobile PDA version of MarketTerminal offers in-depth coverage of essential financial information, news, analytics and real-time prices. It covers 15 exchanges including the London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Euronext, and Deutsche Boerse. Subscribers can configure and receive live price and news alerts, access equities quotes in real time and monitor investment portfolios whilst on the move.

10/05/2006

Arcontech, a leading supplier of real-time market data price distribution and order routing technology today has expanded on its pan-European plans to facilitate compliance for financial institutions impacted by MiFID regulation.

Andrew Miller, Managing Director of Arcontech said: “Working with the MiFID Joint Working Group, we’ve identified three key areas where our CityVision StarNet global real-time market data platform provides important components of the complete solution.”

These are in the areas of pre-trade price transparency, post-trade reporting and best execution. Arcontech is currently engaging with partners and clients to offer services across Europe to address the MiFID requirements.

It will be compulsory for “Systematic Internalisers” (SI) (for example, firms that cross trades on their own book) to make public, in real-time, firm prices that are close to the market. CityVision makes it simple for SIs to publish directly or via intermediaries.

All firms trading in regulated markets will be required to report trades “as close to real-time as possible”. In the UK, the London Stock Exchange currently supports this function but under MiFID firms can choose other channels for reporting, which may lead to competition and cost reduction.

It is likely that one or more alternative Data Aggregators will seize this opportunity. CityVision is designed to publish simultaneously to as many different destinations as required and so ideal for both pre and post trade reporting, however many reporting channels there may be.

CityVision also supports translation, normalisation and aggregation of data from multiple sources, as well as onward distribution of data to multiple destinations and so is highly suitable for the central hub or ‘ticker plant’ operations of the aggregators.

Miller again: “We can support many different protocols, so integration with existing systems should be straightforward. For those already enabled or moving towards emerging standards, our FIX and FAST capabilities will enable rapid deployment.”

It is also essential for both the buy and sell side to be able to see this data to know where the market is, in order to obtain and/or prove “best execution”.

StarNet offers many options for viewing and integrating with data. It supports many publishing paradigms, including legacy feed emulation, web distribution, and interfaces to platforms like RMDS, Excel and databases etc. An API in various languages supports custom integration, providing great flexibility at every stage in the publishing life cycle.

01/03/2006

Driven by a significant market demand for highly efficient, quickly scaleable, very low latency and dynamically configurable data management systems Arcontech’s CityVision product suite is fast gaining a reputation as the system of choice for a range of high profile financial institutions.

Arcontech has made major investment in strategic developments to strengthen the CityVision product for global deployment in mission critical operations. Features such as real-time re-configuration, improved user interfaces, more detailed status information with full SNMP integration and zero down-time support the 24/7 operation demanded by an increasing number of global clients.

Recent successes include the extension of an existing Multi Vendor Contribution System at a major global broker to include contributions to Bloomberg and an integrated distribution hub in Asia, as well as being chosen by a major US Bank for its vendor contributions. Additionally the CityVision MVCS System is currently being trialled by a Tier 1 European bank.

Arcontech’s Managing Director, Andrew Miller comments: “I am delighted with these recent successes. CityVision has been designed as a flexible, scaleable and robust data platform. Our existing and new clients use CityVision to future proof themselves against anticipated growth in the areas of data ingestion, data contribution and data distribution which is being driven by regulatory changes such as MiFID. We will continue to enhance CityVision to meet our clients’, and the market’s requirements”