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

Summit Report – Latency Measurement Vendors – Nasdaq Wants You!

Subscribe to our newsletter

If you work for a vendor of latency measurement technology, then you should have attended the Low-Latency Summit in New York City the other week. During the pre-lunch keynote, Nasdaq OMX principal technologist Dominick Paniscotti outlined efforts at the exchange group to measure – and so reduce – latency, and also put out a call for “innovative latency management products” to help them in those endeavors.

On Paniscotti’s wish list are products offering:

– High precision time stamping of network packets.
– Real-time ultra-low latency aggregation devices.
– Flexible/programmable correlation algorithms.
– Standardisation of network capture device protocols … allowing interoperability between different vendors.
– Lower cost per message capture and linear scalability.

Paniscotti noted during the presentation that Nasdaq uses a combination of home-grown and vendor products to measure latency. In the latter category, it has deployed latency monitoring from both Corvil and Correlix to provide independent latency statistics for various deployments around the world.

Importantly, he noted how latency has been reduced at Nasdaq in recent times. Specifically, at the beginning of 2009, average latency on Nasdaq was 600 microseconds, whereas today, around 70 microseconds is common.

But he emphasised that the challenge is not just in reducing latency, but also jitter, to ensure higher determinism. Whereas the exchange has focused in the past on average latencies, in the future it plans to focus much more on the outlier statistics that they experience, to reduce those too.

Jitter, he noted, can be introduced by many different components of a system, and that the reduction of it has driven technology innovation. For example, he noted, a network switch that was considered a good performer just 18 months ago, would now be considered a bad one.

Paniscotti also commented that latency measurement tools need to keep pace with overall latency and jitter reduction, and not be a source of either. Whereas in the past, software taps and tools such as tcpdump were commonly used, they are no longer accurate enough or introduce latency themselves.

And there are additional challenges. Syncronisation of timestamps across distributed systems is a must have, and often the cause of incorrect measurements. There’s also the need to store latency information for long periods for historic analysis. A Big Data problem in a low-latency world.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: The Role of Data Fabric and Data Mesh in Modern Trading Infrastructures

23 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes The demands on trading infrastructure are intensifying. Increasing data volumes, the necessity for real-time processing, and stringent regulatory requirements are exposing the limitations of legacy data architectures. In response, firms are re-evaluating their data strategies to improve agility, scalability, and governance....

BLOG

Unlocking Competitive Edge: Outsourcing and Managed Services in Trading Technology

Faced with intensifying cost pressures, regulatory shifts, evolving market dynamics and rapid technological change, capital markets firms are seeing the roles of outsourcing and managed services becoming increasingly strategic. But how do they decide what to outsource and what to retain in-house? How can they preserve agility and oversight while handing over key infrastructure? And...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...