About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Low Latency and Windows – Strange But True?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Reading through the latest from TS-Associates, it was interesting to learn that their Application Tap function now supports Windows, from the makers of Xbox.  It got me thinking about how widespread the adoption of Windows is for low-latency applications, so I asked the company’s CEO Henry Young for his thoughts.

“There is a surprising amount of Windows out there, and low latency is not the only thing that drives the need for precision instrumentation,” says Young, who adds, “Two of our largest customers for TipOff make significant use of Windows, mainly for legacy reasons,  i.e. that’s what their trading platforms were originally developed on.”

And there’s more: “Generally, green field systems designed from the outset for low latency get dropped onto Linux or even more extreme OSes, but there is a huge amount of legacy stuff out there. Remember that the whole of the London Stock Exchange used to be on Windows .Net.”

Plus – given that platform moves can be pretty costly and difficult to pull off – “maintenance and instrumentation is sometimes a tactical way forwards for move in a low-latency-ish direction.” So that’s the reality – another take on investment versus business benefits.

Young says that the Windows version of the Application Tap was developed in response to requests from three customers, and one is now live.

So, who out there is selling or deploying Window-based systems for low latency apps? Come on – own up!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process, and extract value from market data, offering greater scalability, efficiency, and intelligence. This webinar,...

BLOG

smartTrade Taps AWS Hybrid Cloud to Slash Deployment Times and Power AI-Driven Trading

smartTrade Technologies is fundamentally overhauling its deployment and innovation capabilities through a new hybrid cloud initiative with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The project, dubbed MetaCloud, empowers smartTrade to provision complete client trading environments in under 15 minutes according to the company – a dramatic acceleration aimed at boosting scalability and operational agility. At the core...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

The Data Management Implications of Solvency II

Bombarded by a barrage of incoming regulations, data managers in Europe are looking for the ‘golden copy’ of regulatory requirements: the compliance solution that will give them most bang for the buck in meeting the demands of the rest of the regulations they are faced with. Solvency II may come close as this ‘golden regulation’:...