OpenMAMA:Open source messaging API for the capital markets

Table of Contents:

Introduction ...................................................................................................................2

Current landscape and trends ...............................................................................3

Avoiding vendor lock-in & accelerating time to market ...............................4

Advanced technology and support ......................................................................5

Key elements ................................................................................................................6

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................7

About NYSE Technologies .......................................................................................8

OpenMAMA | 2

Table of Contents:

Introduction ...................................................................................................................2

Current landscape and trends ...............................................................................3

Avoiding vendor lock-in & accelerating time to market ...............................4

Advanced technology and support ......................................................................5

Key elements ................................................................................................................6

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................7

About NYSE Technologies .......................................................................................8

Introduction Seeking to reduce the cost and friction of implementing innovative new messaging applications and integrating multiple messaging platforms for the financial services industry, NYSE Technologies recently open sourced their industry-standard software, Middleware Agnostic Messaging APISM (MAMASM). Now called OpenMAMA, the vendor neutral platform implements a simple, consistent interface that can be used across a broad spectrum of native middleware platforms. OpenMAMA accelerates the process of developing and implementing new trading solutions while allowing companies to protect the investments they have made in current middleware technologies.

OpenMAMA is hosted by the Linux Foundation, and will be supported and expanded by a robust community of developers and industry leaders from the financial services industry, as well as hardware and middleware vendors. MAMA has long been considered the de-facto messaging standard for financial services; however, as the new open industry standard, OpenMAMA promises to increase flexibility and reduce development times, leading to lower costs and expanded support for a broad range of interconnected programs. It already delivers a robust set of features with unmatched reliability and performance that ensure a uniform, future-proof middleware messaging solution for financial services firms.

Open sourcing MAMA is a continuation of NYSE Technologies’ mission to create a capital markets community that benefits from our extensive global network and utilizes the best, most innovative technologies from a range of service providers. It contributes to a robust, frictionless global trading community where market participants can interact on a truly seamless and level playing field.

3 | OpenMAMA

Current Landscape and Trends As the primary means of communicating between participants, messaging plays a central role in world financial markets. Traders and banks, hedge funds and other interested parties receive market data describing quotes, trades and other events as individual messages. Message oriented middleware is the low level software and hardware infrastructure that provides the plumbing for these messages. In order to feed this data into trading algorithms and other applications, code must be written that allows applications to produce and consume messages over this middleware. This would be a relatively simple matter if there was one middleware standard used throughout the financial industry. Instead, there are several major middleware systems, a number of smaller ones and myriad proprietary middleware systems. Having to communicate over multiple middleware platforms, and protect yourself from becoming locked in to any one vendor, makes it slower and more expensive to develop new applications. It also runs the risk of adding latency to your applications.

NYSE Technologies’ Middleware Agnostic Messaging APISM (MAMASM) was created to make this process more efficient by allowing applications to work with multiple middlewares through a single, simple interface. MAMA is a high-performance, client-side integration layer that interfaces with the three major middleware systems used by most major financial firms:

� LBM from Informatica

� Rendezvous from Tibco

� Data Fabric from NYSE Technologies

MAMA allowed developers to bring applications to market far more rapidly, irrespective of the messaging platform, while ensuring high performance in terms of both throughput and latency. As a result, MAMA attracted over 150 customers and has become the de facto industry standard. As a proprietary product of NYSE Technologies, however, MAMA only provides support for three major middlewares. Furthermore, firms using MAMA often have their own internal, proprietary messaging systems. The need to integrate internal messaging systems and the possibility that NYSE Technologies might not support future improvements in middleware from other vendors has driven customers to create a defensive wrapper (or shim layer) around MAMA to facilitate integration and protect against vendor lock-in. This “wrapping the wrapper” leads to less efficient code, longer development cycles, and substantially more code to maintain and support.

MAMA fell short of the single, universal standard needed to support a frictionless global development environment. To reach that goal, MAMA would need input from a broader community of developers. So, with the support of the Linux Foundation, NYSE Technologies open sourced MAMA in October of 2011. The new OpenMAMA now benefits from a far broader community of community of developers and sponsors – both customers and competitors – who can make MAMA a more versatile and useful product for the financial sector and beyond. Without fear of vendor lock-in, developers will now be able to write programs to a common messaging interface, shaving weeks, and even months, off of the development process. OpenMAMA levels the playing field, supporting a free and open global trading community.

Having to communicate over multiple middleware platforms, and protect yourself from becoming locked in to any one vendor, makes it slower and more expensive to develop new applications.

OpenMAMA | 4

Avoiding vendor lock-in and accelerating time to marketWithout a standard, open-source messaging API, application developers were forced to spend a lot of time writing and rewriting code to support the full complement of middleware environments. Extensive effort was required to isolate applications from MAMA so as not to be locked in to a single vendor. This was done by writing an additional abstraction layer over MAMA that allowed applications to work with proprietary and other unsupported middleware systems. In essence, developers had to write a wrapper around the MAMA wrapper if they wanted applications that took full advantage of what the market offers and integrate fully with existing internal systems. This additional abstraction layer increases cost and negatively impacts performance.

As an open-source initiative, OpenMAMA removes these concerns. Developers can now write application code directly to the OpenMAMA instead of an underlying native API or an unnecessary wrapper. OpenMAMA enables users to switch the native middleware without any code changes. If OpenMAMA doesn’t support the middleware they require be it open source, commercial or proprietary, they can write a bridge to enhance it, or turn to the OpenMAMA open source community for help. This flexibility creates a number of advantages:

� Future portability to alternative middleware platforms

� True open source solution avoids any vendor lock-in at the API or middleware level

� Use of multiple middleware platforms in a single environment (possibly simultaneously)

By not having to worry about isolating applications from MAMA, application developers can dramatically cut the time it takes to set up a new trading desk

5 | OpenMAMA

Advanced technology and supportWhile NYSE Technologies has ceded control of OpenMAMA to the Linux Foundation, we will continue to provide and support a certified enterprise edition of the API. Without any increase in costs, the customers who currently license MAMA will gain the flexibility and accelerated development schedules of the open source initiative, without sacrificing the reliable, expert support they have trusted for years.

NYSE Technologies is deeply committed to maintaining a central role in the new OpenMAMA development community, contributing our talents and expertise to help OpenMAMA reach its full potential as the universal standard for middleware messaging solutions. OpenMAMA’s modular architecture allows middleware vendors and other developers to easily add support for new middlewares and payloads. It already implements many value-added capabilities, including entitlements, sequence number checking and automatic recaps on top of the bridge APIs. So, new middleware and message bridges get these advanced features “for free”. For most middleware, implementing an OpenMAMA bridge requires little more than simple wrappers around existing API functions.

OpenMAMA | 6

Key elements of OpenMAMAOpenMAMA provides value-added features not present in all native middleware platforms. These include application development features as well as administrative and monitoring features:

Extended data type support and hierarchical message structure OpenMAMA offers a number of extended data types, including representations for date/time, prices vectors, and complex nested messages.

Data dictionary support With the ability to define commonly uses fields in a “data dictionary” an OpenMAMA transport uses bandwidth far more efficiently.

Conflation OpenMAMA supports the ability to reduce the size of a message stream by combining multiple distinct messages into fewer messages for middleware bridges that support the required features.

Data Quality OpenMAMA implements a sophisticated data quality layer for all middlewares to more reliably detect, report and recover from failures in the underlying native middleware.

General configuration interface OpenMAMA provides an easy way to read in configuration parameters from a local properties file.

OpenMAMA statistics module OpenMAMA provides a statistics collection module that includes system state, such as CPU and memory utilization, across various operating systems.

7 | OpenMAMA

Fault Tolerance API OpenMAMA includes a facility to manage automatic hot/cold standby failure monitoring and takeover notifications.

Data Entitlements/Permissioning enforcement and reporting OpenMAMA will support the NYSE Technologies OEA entitlements system, ensuring that subscribers only see messages for topics for which they are explicitly configured. OpenMAMA may also be built without any entitlement support, and in the future we expect the community and other vendors to develop support for other entitlement systems.

Simultaneous support for multiple middlewares OpenMAMA eliminates the need for developers to concern themselves with individual middleware implementation as they write their applications, as the specific middleware used is ultimately determined by at run time. Indeed, OpenMAMA enables applications to use multiple native middlewares simultaneously without any code recompilations or re-linking.

Configurable payload support To enhance performance, OpenMAMA has the thinnest possible abstraction layer in message packing/unpacking and message callback invocation. The effort required to pack or unpack payloads depends largely on the individual payload. Proprietary payloads include NYSE WombatMsg, FAST, and NYSE Wirecache.

OpenMAMA | 8

ConclusionBy open sourcing MAMA, NYSE Technologies has removed the friction and overhead in writing applications that use message-sourcing middleware. OpenMAMA becomes the obvious choice for use with any of the native middleware platforms it supports, and as the preferred API for currently unsupported messaging solutions. Not only does OpenMAMA save on long-term software and development costs through its portability benefits, it also provides robust set of features with unmatched reliability and performance.

For many in the financial services industry, MAMA has been the de-facto messaging standard. As a truly free and open source platform, OpenMAMA strives to be the universal standard.

For more information, please visit:

http://nysetechnologies.nyx.com/data-technology/openmama

http://www.openmama.org

http://www. linuxfoundation.org

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About NYSE TechnologiesA division of NYSE Euronext (NYX), NYSE Technologies provides broadly accessible, comprehensive connectivity and transaction capabilities, data and infrastructure services, and managed solutions for a range of customers requiring next-generation performance and expertise for mission critical and value-added trading services. NYSE Technologies offers a diverse array of products, services and solutions to: the Buy Side, including order routing, liquidity discovery and access to a community of over 630 Broker-Dealers and execution destinations globally; the Sell Side, including high performance, end-to-end messaging software and innovative market data products delivered on the world’s largest, most reliable financial transaction network; and Market Venues and Exchanges, including multi-asset exchange platform services, managed services and expert consultancy. With offices across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, NYSE Technologies offers advanced integrated solutions for the global capital markets community, earning the ability to power trading operations for many of the world’s best financial institutions and exchanges. For additional information visit: http://nysetechnologies.nyx.com

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