FIX-related products and services

AthenaGateway Server

Aegis Software FPL
14 Penn Plaza
New York, NY 10122 US

Overview

AthenaGateway Server (“AGS”), a licensable software product, is a scalable, high performance, connectivity solution that facilitates fast, easy and reliable communications between financial services firms, including trading partners and execution venues. Designed to support the high traffic volume generated by the largest broker-dealers or asset managers, the AGS delivers the reliability, speed and ease of use demanded by financial services firms. The AGS communicates messages between the institution’s internal trading applications and destinations such as exchanges, ECNs, broker-dealers, institutional clients, asset managers, and hedge funds.

Application Interface

• The interface to the AGS operates identically across all trading venues, irrespective of the final trading destination.
• Messages from internal servers and workstations are presented using protocols such as sockets, TIB, FIX or MQSeries.
• Support for application programming interfaces (APIs) in JAVA, C/C++ and direct socket connection is provided to support simple integration with trading applications.
• Dynamic message format conversion between the generic name-value-pair and the native message formats for each trading destination is provided;
  custom interfaces can be created to handle customer-specific message formats.
• Messages are then sent using the destination’s native
  protocol for optimal performance.

Performance & Scalability

• The AGS is designed to support the extremely high traffic volume generated by the largest broker-dealers or asset managers.
• An AGS server sustains on a fully recoverable basis a rate in the thousands of messages per second using a single CPU Intel server.
• Performance can scale upward by simply adding additional CPUs or clustered servers.

High Availability

• The AGS has incorporated a redundant server robust failover and recovery solution.
• High availability means quickly recovering from failures. Using the AGS failover recovery occurs in seconds.

Exchange Destinations

• The AGS supports connectivity to NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, INET, ARCA, CME, CME, CBOE, eCBOT, NYMEX using, as appropriate, high speed implementa- tions of native protocols (e.g. CMS, CTCI, OUCH, QIX, FIX 4.X).
• International destination support includes LSE, Xetra, Euronext, Euronext.liffe, Eurex & TIFFE (Tokyo Intl. Financial Futures Exchange).

Multiple Routing Options for Throughput & Availability

• The AGS can be configured to support programmatic, round-robin, or load balanced routing policies for each destination.
• It supports fail-over recovery between multiple lines to a destination and therefore if a line fails, seamless recovery without manual intervention will allow message traffic to continue on another line to the destination.

Real-Time Monitoring & Control, GUI-Based Configuration

• The Athena Communication Monitor (ACM), a JMX- enabled (Java Management Extensions) graphical communication monitor, is provided to monitor and control AGS clusters, allowing the real-time display of
  configuration information, status information and performance data.
• The ACM also supports the monitoring and control of server processes and the services they provide, selectively monitoring traffic, modifying configuration data and starting or stopping lines.
• A control window displays all available protocol sessions, their status, administrative messages and statistics.
• A graphical Configuration utility is provided to tailor the configuration for supported lines and protocols. The ACM is intended for use by technical administrative and operations personnel.

Optional Add-Ins

• With the Inbound FIX add-in, the AthenaGateway Server will accept inbound FIX messages and route them directly to exchange destinations or to AthenaTrader for processing.
• With the AthenaTrader add-in, the AGS will perform order and trade monitoring for management control of order flow, and enable other AthenaTrader calculation features.
  

Benefits of the AthenaGateway Server

• Faster delivery of trades supports best execution objectives and arbitrage opportunities.
• Consistently high level of service and availability.
• Simpler and more reliable connectivity by consolidation of interfaces to trading partners and execution venues.
• Eliminates duplication of effort caused when silo applications independently implement connectivity to exchanges and trading partners.
• Reduces costs by more effectively utilizing lines to execution venues and trading partners.
• Reduces operational, administrative and management costs by requiring less resources to install, configure, manage and support connectivity.

For more information, contact Aegis Software at 212-268-3100 or .

Asset Class

Equities, Fixed Income, FX, Listed Derivatives, OTC Derivatives

Coverage

Europe, North America-Canada, North America-USA

Domain

Order Routing, Proprietary Trading

FIX Version

4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4

Functionality

Allocations and Settlement Instructions, E-mail, Indications of Interest, News, Orders and Execution Reports

Language

Java

Licensing

License + Maintenance

Services

Best Execution Tools, FIX Gateway, FIX Messaging and monitoring, FIX point-to-point connectivity, Trading Applications

Topic

FIX 4.2, FIX 4.3, FIX 4.4, Order routing

Web site

http://www.aegisoft.com/trading_athenagateway.htm

Contact