Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

Henry Ford once said: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” Then, in 1923 Alfred Sloan came along and cleaned his clock by offering a tremendous variety in colors and models. But, Sloan didn’t do it one customer at a time. GM redesigned its manufacturing line with the flexibility to produce a multitude of models and colors without compromising the inherent economies-of-scale of Ford’s assembly line innovation—a practice that today has evolved into the concepts of flexible manufacturing and mass customization.

What does any of this have to do with cloud computing? And for that matter, what does it have to do with financial market data? This is the third post in a series called “Thinking Out Cloud” with the aim of helping financial services and market data IT professionals charged with developing cloud computing strategies separate the cloud buzz from the cloud reality. This post explores the important idea of mass customization in the cloud and its relevance to market data management.

Mass Customization and Market Data

According to Wikipedia, mass customization is about providing “services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency” by offering a “tremendous increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs.” Or rather, have it your way at a cost you can afford. In the last installment in this series entitled Thinking Out Cloud – The Market Data Sweet Spot, I pointed out that the best way to identify market data that can benefit from cloud computing is to look for data that is hard-to-use, hard-to-manage, and hard-to-access. Mass customization on the cloud strikes at the core of the “hard-to-use” problem by replacing inflexible data feeds and files in static formats with financial Web services that allow applications to select and consume highly customized market data sets on the fly.

Mass Customization, Meta Data and Web Services

In software, mass customization is achieved by converting hard-coded application functions into meta-data, so that the functional behavior of the software can be controlled through data on an ad-hoc basis. For example, the only real difference between this Xignite Wordpress blog and a million other Wordpress blogs comes down to a few theme files and the store of data that comprises the brilliant blog posts within. The posts in turn get shuffled around the Internet using RSS (really simple syndication). The RSS standard lies at the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution, powering the distribution of widely varied content such as blogs, news, friends, tweets, music, video, etc., all because a few abstract meta-data elements like “title”, “description”, and “link” can be generalized to contain an enormous and disparate variety of data. Swapping out this data can literally change one blog to any other blog (or one friend to any other friend!).

In cloud computing, meta-data abstraction is realized through Web services (like RSS). Web services take the concept of configurability through meta-data abstraction to its natural limit, because every operation of a Web service is inherently abstracted to meta-data in the XML inputs and outputs of the API. For example, the Xignite delayed stock quote Web service allows applications to retrieve a single quote for a single symbol, multiple quotes for multiple symbols, intraday tick-by-tick prices, market volume and news, simply by varying the Web service operation and the input parameters, i.e., the meta data. Providing access to such a wide variety of information in an ad-hoc fashion from a statically formatted feed or file is simply not possible without lots of hardware, software and custom development–most likely to create a Web service.

Wrap it Up, I’ll Take It!

More plainly, market data Web services are built for mass customization, because they cleanly wrap the underlying market data and data management infrastructure in meta-data enabling highly customized output based on variable input. Therefore, applications that require highly varied, ad-hoc market data subsets will be better served by Web services over the static formats of data feeds and files. Or, as we like to say at Xignite: “There’s an op[eration] for that!”

If you look at our new corporate bond master service, XigniteBondMaster, you’ll quickly see that you can use it to get information for over 125,000 U.S. corporate bonds, including issuer information, maturity dates, coupon rates and so on.  But you’re not likely to see one of the best features of the service until you roll up your sleeves and start digging around in the data:  the ability to look up official CUSIP identifiers with remarkable ease.

CUSIP identifiers are highly valued throughout the industry as the de facto standard for uniquely identifying over 9.1 million financial instruments.  And now you can easily look up CUSIPs for thousands of corporate bonds using XigniteBondMaster.  Interested in a particular issue, but not sure what its CUSIP is?  Try looking it up by the bond issuer!  Or just look it up by bond name.

All CUSIP data comes from CUSIP Global Services, an organization managed by Standard & Poor’s on behalf of the American Bankers Association specifically to oversee the official set of CUSIP identifiers.

You do need to have an agreement in place with CUSIP Global Services in order to receive CUSIP data, since this is highly valued data that must be licensed first.  But once you have an agreement in place, CUSIPs will automatically start appearing in your XigniteBondMaster outputs.

In the next 5 minutes, you could get $5 worth of plumbing services, $30 worth of legal advice or $17 worth of psychotherapy. Or, you could just spend your next five minutes building a real-time stock quote widget. Don’t think it can be done in 5 minutes? Check out a video showing us doing it in less time.

Here’s how you can do the same thing using PHP and Eclipse, although the same basic process can be used for any language and any IDE:
Read more

Every five minutes, a business in the U.S. catches fire, someone in the UK swears, and a clock that took 5 years and £1 million to build before being unveiled by none other than Stephen Hawking, finally tells the time accurately for a second or two.

What will you do with your next 5 minutes?

Here’s a thought: Why not build a real-time forex currency converter? Sound like fun? If so, give it a try using the steps below. Or, if you’d rather leave all the fun to someone else, why not just watch a video of us doing it?

Here’s how it’s done: Read more

Now that the cat’s finally out of the bag on BGCantor’s new on-demand web services, I can finally take the readers of the Xignite blog back stage for a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the biggest initiative in the on-demand financial web services world since the start of Xignite.

BGCantor On-Demand offers fixed income and derivatives data via on-demand web services using Xignite’s core platform.

What happened behind the scenes?  How did this new on-demand business get launched?  And what did it take to launch it?  Well, first and foremost, it took a great team at BGCantor Market Data.  The BGCantor team was absolutely delightful to work with.  Everyone was highly knowledgeable, very responsive, dedicated to accomplishing the mission and very excited about the whole project.  We couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with.

Together, the BGCantor/Xignite team started by designing web services to be truly application-ready, combining Xignite’s web service experience with BGCantor’s in-depth market data knowledge.  Then we coded the web services on top of the XigniteOnDemand market data distribution platform for rapid development on a robust, high-performance, highly scalable architecture.  At the same time, we also built the BGCantor On-Demand website and tightly integrated it with the web services themselves.  To help manage the new on-demand business, we also deployed an administrative portal for on-going management of customer accounts.  At the same time, on the sales and marketing front, we worked together to find just the right usage-based pricing model to drive strong revenue growth for BGCantor while also delivering exceptional value for BGCantor’s customers.  Then we collaborated on developing marketing collateral and sales tools.

As for showing you blooper videos of our behind-the-scenes footage, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite convince Legal to sign off on that. Sorry. Maybe next time.

A few years back, if you asked your IT professionals about Cloud Computing, you probably would have received a blank stare, followed up with an “I love my servers” comment. At that time, even the term “Cloud Computing” was plagued by confusion, uncertainty and a fair amount of misinformation. Early misconceptions were further reinforced by the many ‘cloud flavors’ being lumped into one term, SaaS, PaaS, utility computing, virtualized computing, managed services, resource computing, elastic computing and so on. Many concluded that Cloud Computing was more a buzzword than a definable technology.

Today, that is no longer the case, with an overwhelming consensus affirming that the winds of change are blowing in the clouds favor. The desire to move into the clouds is quickly turning into a necessity, with a wide range of internal and external forces leading the charge. Redundancy, efficiency, availability, simplicity, stability or plain & simple economics, every entity has its own unique set of reasons for moving into the clouds. With its inherent time and cost benefits, It’s no surprise that there is a growing wave of support for Cloud Computing, with some of that support coming from some unlikely places. Read more

What does the Albanian Lek, Dominican Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and 140 other global currencies have in common?  They can all be found in the newly updated XigniteCurrencies section.  Redesigned from the ground up, the new currencies section has been expanded to provide the tools and information necessary to get up and running with Global Currency Data.

In addition to covering over 85% of the world’s currencies, there are several improvements that we are very excited about.  First, we have expanded the section to include two new areas, one dedicated to providing detailed product information, and the other dedicated to providing comprehensive developer resources.  We have simplified the sites navigation, while also adding cool new features including several educational videos, expanded product information and an entirely new set of interactive demo applications.  We have even created a step-by-step video on how to get up and running with a simple real-time currency converter.  If you haven’t visited the section recently, you should give it a peek.

Product Resources - Currency Overview - - What Is On-Demand - - Live Forex Demos - - Global Data Coverage -

Developer Resources - How-To Video - - Getting Started - - Forex WSDL File - - Web Service Operations -

What’s most exciting are the countless ways our global currency data can be used. Our customers have proven that it doesn’t matter if you’re an Aviation Catering Company, Armored Transportation Service, National Menswear Retail Chain, Global Automotive Manufacturer or Cool Online Gaming Startup, with XigniteCurrencies, the applications are truly endless.