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

Tech Matters with Pete Harris: Kaazing’s Living Web For Everything-as-a-Service

Subscribe to our newsletter

Founded in Silicon Valley back in 2007 as a better way to deliver interactive web apps, Kaazing is getting a new lease of life with the emergence of what it calls the Living Web – its marketing spin on what’s more often called the Internet of Things (IoT), where distributed applications of all kinds communicate and collaborate to deliver fully functional services to both businesses and individuals.

As applications in the financial markets are increasingly delivered as services, for both human consumption on a wide variety of devices, and for machine processing in the cloud and enterprise data centres, so the technologies that underpin the IoT have the opportunity to become a ubiquitous data fabric for finance. In order to be considered, they will need to provide requisite performance, scalability and security, and that’s what Kaazing – and its new leadership – is focused on.

While founders Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows are staying with the company as president and CTO, respectively, the company will no doubt be driven upwards to meet these opportunities and challenges by new CEO Vikram Mehta and chief architect Todd Montgomery.

Mehta has a background in enterprise systems and data communications, and was founding CEO of Nortel spinout Blade Network Technologies, selling it to IBM in 2010 and then leading IBM’s System Networking division. Meanwhile, Montgomery joins Kaazing from data management specialist Informatica, where he was vice president of architecture since 2010. Before that, he was CTO at low-latency messaging pioneer 29West, which Informatica acquired.

No doubt Mehta will look to build the company’s position in the IoT marketplace (which IT analyst IDC reckons has a $7.3 trillion potential) by investment in sales, support and marketing operations, which will likely mean adding to the $37 million in venture backing the company has so far secured. And as for technology, Montgomery’s experience at handling the extreme performance requirements of Wall Street should feed into Kaazing’s future developments as they scale to meet the IoT challenge.

So what’s the Kaazing secret sauce? Unlike standard web communications, which is mostly focused on the request/response delivery of static HTML pages via the HTTP protocol, Kaazing’s standards-based WebSockets technology is a low-overhead, full duplex protocol allowing simultaneous communications in both directions, and delivery of both binary and text payloads. It also leverages the underlying TCP protocol support for Port 80 to traverse firewalls, routers and other network equipment that can make machine-to-machine data transfers tricky.

Already in the financial markets, Kaazing’s technology has been incorporated into trading portals, in dashboards for risk management and in performance monitoring systems. But its deployment could increase significantly as cloud/services-based delivery (via public and private internets) and mobile access becomes the norm for applications from market and reference data, to pre-trade analytics to trade execution, compliance and risk processing. And everything else.

Pete Harris is Principal of Lighthouse Partners, an Austin, TX-based consulting company that helps innovative technology companies with their marketing endeavors. www.lighthouse-partners.com.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: High-Performance Networks & Low-Latency Connectivity for Trading

10 June 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes With financial markets becoming more complex and interconnected in today’s electronic trading environment, trading firms, exchanges, and infrastructure providers need to continually push the boundaries of network performance to stay ahead. Ultra-low latency, seamless connectivity, and resilient infrastructure are no longer...

BLOG

Leveraging Data as a Differentiator

What’s the key to unlocking real value in AI, trading strategies, and market analytics? High-quality historical data. Live from TradingTech Summit London, this episode of FinTech Focus TV dives into the evolution of historical market data and its role in shaping smarter trading decisions. Toby sits down with Elliot Banks, Chief Product Officer at BMLL,...

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

Corporate Actions

Corporate actions has been a popular topic of discussion over the last few months, with the DTCC’s plans for XBRL and ISO interoperability, as well as the launch of Swift’s new self-testing service for corporate actions messaging, STaQS, among others. However, it has not been a good start to the year for many of the...