US exchange operator Direct Edge has deployed technology from Microsoft and Informatica as the basis for its trading platforms.
Microsoft boasts that it won the deal to help Direct Edge reduce latency and support growing trading volumes ahead of Linux and Unix.
The firm's Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, along with Informatica Ultra Messaging, has helped the US's fourth biggest exchange operator slash latency by 83% to 340 microseconds, enabling a 580% increase in throughput.
The exchange has seen an increase in its market share of US equities, which stands at around nine per cent to 11%, since implementation, claims Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Informatica Ultra Messaging is being used to develop a peer-to-peer design for efficient communications between applications within the exchange platform.
The technology has also cut costs, with the current platform reducing the server count by 25% compared with the number of servers that would have been required to scale the predecessor platform - saving between $1 million and $1.2 million, according to the vendor.
Steve Bonanno, CTO, Direct Edge, says: "When we put our stock exchange on the Microsoft platform, our No. 1 goal was to achieve latency low enough to compete against the biggest exchanges in the country. We built a real-time processing engine on Microsoft technology that published several hundred thousand transaction messages per second. At 340 microseconds, Windows delivered."
In contrast to the Direct Edge implementation, the London Stock Exchange is currently in the process of ditching its Microsoft-based platform in favour of a Linux system from recently acquired MillenniumIT.