Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

If you’d like to know what financial market data web services and mashups can really do for you in plain English, then check out the latest NetworkWorld interview with the expert (our CEO Stephane!).

Click on the image above to go to the NetworkWorld podcast.

One of the toughest things to explain about what we do… is what we actually do…because it can be really obscure and difficult to communicate to non-developers. After giving all the marketing-speak of how we lower TCO, get rid of IT headaches etc, a lot of people come back with “Uh, yeah, but what do you actually DO?”

So, we’ve been working hard to create some pictures that simply, yet accurately describe what we do, and so far this is what we have come up with.

What are financial Web services or Cloud services?

The idea for this picture is that we help companies do the following:

• come to our website, sign up, try and buy our Web services on-demand like Salesforce.com
• since it’s all over the Web, there is no in-house software etc. requried
• get your data by the song (service) instead of a CD (feed) like iTunes
• to make it easier to build financial apps and websites

(Note: for the lawyers, the trademarks above remain the property of their respective owners)

Then, just when we think we’ve done it, they ask: “So, what is this Splice mashup community thingy then?”  This is the picture we came up with for this question…

Splice Web services on-demand community mashup platform

We’re still working on this one, so any help is appreciated.

After almost two years of stealth development, we are launching Splice, the first on-demand Web services mashup platform for serious developers of professional financial websites and applications…you!

Splice takes advantage of Web services standards to create a drag-and-drop Web services development studio for mashing up a set of Web services into a unique service tailored to a specific application need…a splice. We’ve also built a community around it, so developers can share their splices and re-use splices from others to make development even easier. The Splice initial release supports the following:

• Combine many services into a single call.
• Integrate private and 3rd party web services.
• Format a service to exactly fit your application.
• Re-use Splices to power any application.
• Share your services with other developers.

Click on the image for a larger version.

The idea for Splice initially came from our clients. While our baseline Web services often meet their needs out-of-the-box, some requested that we customize them to better fit their requirements. Common requests included optimizing for performance (lower XML verbosity), reducing the numbers of calls needed to collect multiple data sets, or customizing outputs. Rather than keep doing this on a one-off basis, we decided to empower you to do it yourself.

The best news is that Splice is not only free to try, it is also free to use for existing clients under Standard support or above. You can create and operate one free splice per service under subscription.

Please register and let us know what you think!