Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

This month we put out a press release announcing Forbes.com as a customer, but as the account manager  I thought I’d give a little behind-the-scenes look at this project, because to me it illustrates what Xignite is really about.  Forbes was looking for a quick and economical, yet accurate solution to get real-time stock quotes on their website (as in not 15 minute delayed, but real-time). We tossed around some ideas and eventually landed on BATS Exchange as the best solution for their needs.  Unfortunately at the time, Xignite did not offer BATS Exchange quotes as a Web service.

While it’s not uncommon for us to add new operations or even entirely new services for clients, this was a much bigger project than the norm. But after all, it was Forbes.com right? In order to meet Forbes’ requirements we needed to add a brand new data feed and deliver streaming, self-updating widgets with real-time quotes at the traffic level of a Top 5 financial news site…on a tight deadline.

Now, being the “sales guy” (as in “so easy, even the sales guy can do it”) I’m used to promising a bit more than the engineering team appreciates–it’s my job.  Then, Leo (Xignite’s CTO) said we could pull it off in about 60 days. Now I’ve been in software sales for more than a few years, but this still made me a little nervous. As it turns out Leo knows a fair bit more than I do about our engineering capabilities, and with a lot of hard work and a few late night hours they provisioned a new feed for BATs, setup new servers, designed the widgets in collaboration with Forbes and pushed it all out to Amazon EC2 without a hiccup.

Who’s the hero now? Nope, still not me! But I did feel a sense of personal and company pride on the day this was introduced to Forbes.com readers.

It is always fun when customers find unusual applications for our Web services, since the whole idea of offering market information on-demand is to enable new applications.  Recently, investment consultant DeMarche Associates, Inc., announced their newest list of the Best 100 CEOs. The award is based on their own proprietary Migration analysis also used to identify the Best 100 Companies.  DeMarche then screens the “Best” analysis for CEOs who receive compensation at the lower end of the spectrum (with data provided by Xignite’s compensation Web service!).  Therefore, the Best CEO Award goes to the companies with CEOs who give shareholders’ the most for their money.

(check out the attribution below the list of CEOs)