Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

It takes 5 minutes to beat cream into butter, write half of your name in Elvish, or create a homemade tattoo gun.  Or if you want to get really wild, you could spend your next 5 minutes creating a Windows application to get real-time precious metal quotes.  If that’s a little too wild for you, you could also live vicariously through us by watching a video of us doing it.  But if you’re ready to throw caution to the wind and give it a try for yourself, here’s how:
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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

I really liked how Max Bowie characterized Xignite as “disruptive” in a piece he published in Inside Market Data earlier this week, entitled “Appetite for Disruption.” He was covering our latest release of equity options web services XigniteOptions and XigniteRealTimeOptions, but his “disruptive” moniker couldn’t be more appropriate for all of Xignite as a company.

He dubbed us as “disruptive” because our equity options services changed the economics of getting options data so much that customers like iVerit are now able to create new businesses delivering this high-volume, high-expense market data at rates affordable even to small private investors over small, affordable devices like the iPhone.

But the truth is that virtually every time we launch a new web service, we see this pattern of disruptive technology creating new opportunities to penetrate existing markets much more deeply. That’s because it’s the on-demand delivery model itself, not any particular web service, that creates the order-of-magnitude changes in economics that cause disruption and new opportunities to deepen existing markets.

So thanks to Max for giving us a rep as a high-tech company running amok causing market depth and disruption wherever we go.

With 2010 quickly approaching, we wanted to celebrate the holidays with our friends & partners in the NYC Area. Join the Xignite crew for some good food, great drinks and special holiday gifts.

Hang-out with Xignite CEO Stephane Dubois and a handful of other Xignite’rs at Stout NYC, Thursday December 17th from 5:30p to 7:30p. We will be located in the Dart Alley Area of Stout’s Cellar.

While everyone that attends will be hooked up with the latest Xignite gear (shirts, USB’s, shot glasses, etc.), the first ten people to arrive will receive a very special gift pack, worth $50 each. We look forward to enjoying great food, cold beers and a quick dart shootout with our friends & partners in NYC.

I was reminded when we launched XigniteGlobalRealTime this week of how small the world has become. There was a time when traveling from Europe to my house in California would have taken months by sea, then months by covered wagon. Now I can make the trip in a single non-stop 21-hour flight. Granted, I have to brave the kid kicking the back of my seat, screaming babies, the guy with N1H1 to my right, and the guy to my left who spends all 21 hours trying to sell me life insurance while telling me his life story. But at least I don’t have to worry about scurvy… just airline food.

The world of market data has also gotten much smaller. Not too long ago, getting intraday stock quotes from Europe’s biggest exchanges was simply out of reach for any U.S. company that didn’t have a six-figure technology budget. Now even small startup companies on a shoestring budget can get real-time Level 1 stock quotes from even the smallest European exchanges, not to mention countless other exchanges around the world. What’s next? Frequent data miles for global market data usage? (Hmmm… Not a bad idea.)

If you search the internet looking for U.S. Stock Market Data, you’ve probably found as I have, that the experience can be fairly dry and unentertaining.  You will come across countless websites offering one data set or another, are often missing the critical data points you need, or conversely deliver way too much data for your projects requirements. 

Either way, once you tally up the combined costs of data feeds, network connections, servers, databases, manpower and integration, you will find that traditional delivery methods can be downright depressing.  Time and time again, we hear this feedback from new and prospective customers, telling us that they’re tired of the same old data song and dance.

Xignite's own Farris Pine, adding some fun to the U.S. Stock Quote videos.

Luckily, weve changed that tune with the rollout of our all new U.S. Stock Quote Section.  With this full section re-design, we have put the fun back in U.S. Stock Market Data.  We’ve stacked real-time, delayed and historical data together so you can easily compare and contrast what data sets work best for you.  We offer fun new video tutorials, handy data coverage comparisons, cool interactive demos, tons of helpful sample code and a wealth of easy to use Web service operations. 

With Xignite, you’ll be a rockstar for accelerating project timelines, accounting will love you for coming in under budget, and your developers might even take you to lunch for making their jobs so much easier.  Take a look at this new section by visiting http://www.xignite.com/stock-quote/20003.html.