Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

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.

SOAP has had a little bit of bad rap lately. Some people think it is too complicated compared to its cousins REST and POX (plain old XML). The truth is that it all depends on the development environment you use. To prove our point, Xignite made this video that shows how you can integrate a web service in your application in less than 60 seconds and 3 lines of code. Watch it on YouTube:

Here is a higher quality Flash Version.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with the senior IT management team of one of one of the countries’ largest commercial banks. This was an open, round table discussion involving multiple Silicon Valley startup companies who—like us—try to woo similar-sized enterprises into using their latest and coolest wares. The CTO started saying that in the old days, standard software was supposed to meet 80% of a firm’s need, with the remaining 20% requiring customizations to fit the firm’s process. “With packaged software these days”, he said “it is more like 50%/50%. This forces us to spend a lot of time customizing things, while we are actually trying to be more agile and more responsive to changing market conditions.”

This comment struck a chord with me. Many IT executives now understand that re-usable web services finally offer the promise to address those changing needs. Instead of buying a standard app that only does 50% of the job, the firm can build a custom application from re-usable web services. If you can buy most of the services you need, you get the best of both worlds: the fit of
a custom app for less than the price of a standard app.

That’s all nice and good, but there is a big assumption built in: you must be able to purchase most of the services you need without having to customize them much. Otherwise you are back to where you started. And there lies the problem with the state of the web service industry today. Dana Gardner made it clear on his ZDNet blog last month: “There are either not many services available or the services are too general and not specific to a specialized vertical industry or a niche function.”. Dana further states that 80% of those services need to be customized. This type of problem could seriously hamper the success of composite applications in IT America.

Since we have been delivering web services for a while, we saw that problem coming a while back. This is why we not only offer a broad and deep set of integrated web services sharply focused on a specialized industry and function (financial market and industry data–in case you did not notice), but we also engineer those services with the needs of the composite application designer and developer in mind. Our goal is to make those re-usable components so integration-ready that you just have to drop them “as-is” in your composite applications. We still have ways to go, but we will get
there.

And what’s the payoff you say? Gardner again puts it best: “The higher [developers] can drive the percentage of reuse, the more scale and productivity they gain. They become the go-to organization for cost-efficient applications in a specific industry, or for specialized business processes.”