The American Stock Exchange (Amex) says it has selected Talarian’s SmartSockets communications technology to replace the incumbent provider Tibco and provide the platform for its next generation options exchange.

The exchange says it chose Talarian over other vendors because of it’s ability to meet stringent performance conditions, including sustained rates of more than 25,000 messages per second.

Bob Rendine, senior vice president, Amex, says: "We needed to re-architect our system to provide scalable real-time performance, accelerated application development cycles and mission-critical fault tolerance. Talarian was the only company with the in-house consultant knowledge as well as a robust product capable of meeting our revenue-critical demands."

In a separate announcement, the Malaysian Exchange of Securities Dealing and Automated Quotation (Mesdaq) has plumped for a trading system from partners Sun Microsystems and Sri Lanka-based Millenium Information Technologies.

The real-time Internet-enabled system provides flexibility to build incrementally, and scalability to surging transaction volumes as Mesdaq continues to expand, say the companies. Built on Sun's open architecture, the system utilises Millennium IT's Effimark software and supports both quote and order driven market architectures.

Millennium's Effimark software incorporates a Dynamic Business Innovator(DBI) component, which isolates the business logic from the application logic and acts as an intelligent intermediary between the two. "We were particularly impressed by the Dynamic Business Innovator, which allows Mesdaq to easily change its business rules in order to respond to the dynamic trading environment," says Encik Abdullah Abdul, Mesdaq president.