Arcontech unveils new enterprise Status Navigator

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