NYSE Technologies is planning to open source its messaging APIs, and hopes to attract other market participants – and competing data providers – to adopt them. The plan was outlined by Tony McManus, head of Enterprise Software at the exchange’s technology unit, speaking at a recent FutureDATA event in London.
The APIs in question are NYSE Technologies’ Middleware Agnostic Messaging API (MAMA) and the Middleware Agnostic Market Data API (MAMDA). Along with those, a data model is being created to allow applications to make sense of the data payloads. McManus noted the goal is to make the APIs and data model an industry standard.
McManus noted that NYSE Technologies is in dialog with its “hardest competitors” to pursuade them to partner on the initiative. Noting that the open source move is one away from being “proprietary and protectionist” and also “a risky strategy,” McManus said the company’s belief is that its innovation in technology will give it a leading position in what will be an larger marketplace for data services.
That marketplace is one for enterprise data as a whole, as opposed to a narrower one for ultra low-latency trading applications. As such, latency is just one factor being considered by customers. Others include ease of integration, data coverage, avoiding vendor lock-in, and cost.
In that respect, NYSE Technologies expects its Data Fabric messaging middleware – especially its recently-release 6.0 release – will prove formidable because of its performance, scalabilty and support of different data transports.
Open sourcing of data APIs is not new, though they are somewhat in vogue at present. Bloomberg is one market data vendor making noises about providing open source APIs. Also, the Open Market Data Initiative – which has been supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch – has defined an API (MDAL – for Market Data Abstraction Layer) and has developed a number of direct market data feeds that support it.
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