The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) has recruited seven top Wall Street firms to kick-start a programme for measuring the performance of trading technology solutions.
The customer-driven benchmarking council launches with seven of the largest Wall Street securities firms as charter members, including Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and HSBC.
The group will establish three sets of benchmarks, corresponding to the three basic steps in making a trade - market data benchmarks based on workloads such as direct exchange-feed integration, market data distribution, tick storage and retrieval; analysis benchmarks based on workloads such as trading algorithms, price generation, risk calculation; and execution benchmarks based on workloads such as smart order routing, execution-related messaging.
The benchmarks will measure the performance of software such as market data systems, messaging middleware and complex event processing systems (CEP), as well as new underlying technologies such as hardware-based feed and messaging solutions, hardware-based analytics accelerators, compute and data grid solutions, InfiniBand and 10-gigabit Ethernet networks, multicore processors and the latest operating system and server technologies.
"Both customers and vendors tell us that benchmarks that directly relate to customer workloads are very useful," says Peter Lankford, STAC director.
"And both camps believe that putting customers in control of benchmark standards makes perfect sense. STAC is uniquely positioned to facilitate this process, which we believe will reduce the cost of technology evaluation and fuel further innovation for the capital markets."
The council's initial focus is on market data benchmarks, particularly direct feed solutions and market data distribution. It is currently reviewing the 0.5 draft of the market data specifications and is due to finalise the specs by the end of 2007.