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

A-Team Insight Blogs

Datacom Taps Formby, Releases Matrix Switch for Co-Lo

Subscribe to our newsletter

Datacom Systems – a vendor of network taps and matrix switches – has appointed Kevin Formby as its new president and CEO. Formby joins from packet capture/latency monitoring specialist Endace, and as such brings with him much experience of the financial markets vertical in general, and low-latency infrastructure in particular. On the heels of Formby’s on-boarding, Datacom has introduced a new matrix switch targeted at co-location environments.

Formby took up the rains of the Syracuse, NY-based company on February 1 and says the opportunity to lead such a company was a big attraction to him. He had been VP of business development at Endace since the middle of 2010, and worked at BT’s Radianz network and proximity centre unit before that. At Datacom, Formby’s mission will be to raise the company’s profile, hone the sales and marketing process, and to direct specific product development efforts for specific verticals.

For sure, financial markets will be one vertical to get attention says Formby, who notes the introduction of the company’s new SingleStream 2222 matrix switch, allowing a co-lo service provider or trading firm to readily and passively tap into as many as 80 1gE and 10gE network connections, to feed network and latency monitoring devices, such as those from Endace, Corvil, TS-Associates, etc. Less than five nanoseconds of addition latency is inserted into the tapped connection.

Formby says that the new switch – along with its sister 2212 offering – is running in production at a major co-lo service provider, who has not sanctioned publication of their name. But he can say that it’s being used to monitor more than 100 10gE connections supporting electronic trading applications.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: The Vanishing Close: Rethinking Trade Surveillance for Always-On Markets

Date: 2 December 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Global markets are moving steadily towards longer and increasingly continuous trading. Extended-hours initiatives in US equities, the growth of overnight venues and the emergence of new markets and instruments are challenging assumptions that have underpinned trading and surveillance systems...

BLOG

Building for the Next Big Event: What Prediction Market Operators Need from Exchange Technology

By Ian Salmon, Head of Product Marketing, Adaptive. Prediction markets have moved from the edges of the financial ecosystem into a space that increasingly resembles regulated market infrastructure. What began as a retail phenomenon around political events and sports outcomes has evolved into a sector attracting institutional capital, established exchanges and serious regulatory attention. The...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Spring, New York, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 9th year, the Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference managed by A-Team Group, is the premier content forum and networking event for investment firms and hedge funds.

GUIDE

The Reference Data Utility Handbook

The potential of a reference data utility model has been discussed for many years, and while early implementations failed to gain traction, the model has now come of age as financial institutions look for new data management models that can solve the challenges of operational cost reduction, improved data quality and regulatory compliance. The multi-tenanted...