Latency sucks

If you're at all like me, you hate waiting. When I get onto the train platform and the sign says the next train is in 6 minutes and not 1, I sigh. Whole minutes lost. When I get finally board, if the train is held at a red signal, I sigh, along with everyone else. We're talking seconds now. But it feels like forever.

If there is one thing that epitomises an intolerance to latency, it's market data, and your customers' appetite for it.

Getting market data to your customer in an efficient, low latency manner defines your business. Having to navigate all the technology obstacles between you and your customer makes the goal difficult. Proxy servers, firewalls, the Web, old client browser technologies; they're all there to make getting your business injected into your customers' business tough. Latency in your market data means risk. But at who's cost? Yours? Your customers? Do you risk having stale data on the market, at the risk of your own customers taking advantage of it and you? Or do you widen the spread to cover yourself, and risk now being uncompetitive?

What if you could stream your market data to your customer across the Web in real-time, with all these obstacles becoming transparent and no longer holding you back? What if you could do it not for only one customer, but hundreds of thousands, or even millions at a time? Using the browser they already have, traversing the same old Web, navigating obstacles already in place, for thousands of messages per second. What if this meant you could tighten the spread, knowing latency was lower, your risk lower, and your customers no longer had to wait? What if this made you more competitive in the market place? What if this was what redefined your business?

What if.....