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The Internet provides an opportunity for financial institutions to reach a wider market audience, to offer services and generate increased revenue as a result.
However, the problem for financial services that require Web based real-time market data distribution is in how they offer a high quality of service through a Web based infrastructure, approaching those of existing professional solutions on the trading floor. They must provide similar features such as secure access control, reliability and scalability, but with the lower cost point provided by Internet distribution.
But delivering real-time Market Data via the Internet conflicts with the original Web paradigm, which is due to the fact that HTML navigation is intrinsically
pull or 'upon request' (as opposed to email which is push).
Polling (the automatic page reloading at predetermined intervals) is a poor attempt at resolving this conflict. In many cases, it fails because it’s not scalable, and places a high demand on the infrastructure by continually reloading entire pages, when only a few fields within it may actually have changed.
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Solving the paradigm conflict |
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The solution to this problem is Lightstreamer, the latest generation of
true push technology. It streams real-time data with HTML and JavaScript, without the need to download or install anything on the client. Since earlier unsuccessful implementations of push technology did not deliver on expectations following it's inception in 1996, it has now finally matured as a viable solution with Lightstreamer. The adopted strategy has been one of simplicity, by using standards (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript), rather than proprietary protocols, yet it is sophisticated in its implementation.
Many earlier iterations of push have failed to solve all the technical issues for a successful deployment, yet the market requirement for a solution remained and in fact continues to grow. While for some large companies, the in-house development of a comparable push solution to Lightstreamer might be a possible consideration. In effect, although Lightstreamer may appear apparently simple in concept, it would take a considerable investment in time and resources to implement and support such a robust and high performance implementation.
With ubiquity and integration in mind, the Lightstreamer architecture is based on standards. Designed from the beginning for speed and ease of integration with any existing platform, simplifying the addition of a push functionality for live data. |
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Lightstreamer Bandwidth Allocation & Management |
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The automatic adaptive control of the TCP network makes Lightstreamer indispensable for pushing live data via the Internet. It can in fact modulate the bandwidth required to push data as a function of the available bandwidth at any instant. This means that whenever the network quality decreases (e.g. congestion), Lightstreamer reduces the update frequency through heuristic filters. In this way, the user always receives new data, independent from the connection speed available at any instant in time.
In addition, there is the facility to define the bandwidth control for each individual user; whereby different service levels (e.g. standard, premium, gold) corresponding to utilized bandwidth (and consequently price) are controlled. Depending on the type of chosen service level, individually assigned
maximum bandwidth, data update frequency and message filtering, are set-up for each user access. |
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Types of Live Pushed Services |
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The diversity and scope for the potential application of Lightstreamer technology is endless. It relates to any application area where it is necessary to update users with real-time information.
Some example applications are:
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Portfolio Management |
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Derivatives |
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FX |
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Energy |
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Trading tools |
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Commodities |
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