(Source: Datamonitor)
FXall, which offers forex trading software as a service in the institutional market, has launched an active trader platform that includes a CEP engine from Oracle. Neither Oracle nor BEA Systems have made significant inroads into capital markets with CEP technology, so the fact that the BEA engine has been embedded into FXall's platform for active traders is a feather in the combined entity's cap.
In March this year, FXall announced the release of FXall Trading, a platform aimed at a different market segment, namely the active trader. This is what might be called the 'sub-institutional' market, with a customer profile including hedge funds, broker/dealers and commodity trading advisors, although not extending to individual retail investors.
The FXall Trading user interface has two components: an anonymous order book (through its Accelor electronic communication network, which was launched in 2007), and FXall's streaming executable prices, in which banks provide continuous two-way pricing to a known set of clients. All of these features are integrated through a function called Aggregator that brings these multiple liquidity pools together. The new Aggregator technology combines a server implementing FXall's proprietary trading algorithms with a complex event processing (CEP) engine from Oracle to carry out the normalization of price data and pattern matching.
To be more exact, the CEP engine included in FXall Trading is a product from the BEA side of the Oracle house, and FXall acknowledges that BEA got involved in the evaluation process to begin with because the forex trading technology developer was already a customer.
Nonetheless, FXall looked at two other engines from leading vendors, both of which are in the group of start-up companies that came into existence specifically to target capital markets, where there is a clear requirement for the stream-handling, low-latency, state-aware capabilities of CEP technology.
It chose the engine from the larger and more generalist independent software vendor (ISV), in fact, because it fitted well with FXall's Java-based development environment and delivered a successful proof of concept. At least one of the others was a more database-oriented product and thus called for Structured Query Language (SQL) programming. The choice of the Oracle/BEA engine did mean more work for FXall, because the product's lack of specific focus on capital markets meant the customer had to develop its own 'price injectors', software that take data price feeds, normalize them and load them into the engine. ISVs that cater specifically for the financial markets already have a number of such injectors written and shipping with their product.
