February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It’s a prospect Antrim man Danny Moore is familiar with, except that for him the big wave heading for New York City is a “tsunami” of data from the financial markets, and he said current computer systems cannot cope with the vast wave of stock quotes.
Moore heads up Wombat Consulting, one of several small projects that are seeking to make financial data feeds — like the Times Square ticker — able to transmit ever-greater amounts of data, and at faster speeds.
“Our product is faster by one or two milliseconds,” Moore said last week, explaining how the amount of financial data available from markets has now come to be known as the “tsunami,” so vast a wave it is.
“We are one of the only companies in the sector with a technology that can scale to the volume,” he said. “We will be gunning for a big share of the market.”
Moore admitted that as yet, Wombat is a small outfit — but one with big ambitions. He believes that the legacy software that dominates the financial universe and is now straining to contain the market data tsunami will have to give way to faster systems such as Wombat’s.
The last few years have seen huge increases in automated trading — which means computers, not blokes in colored jackets, make many trades per second and the more raw data that can be processed per second, the more opportunities for trades.
Jeff Wells, chairperson of the Financial Information Forum, who sits on that organization’s market data capacity planning committee, agreed with Moore’s assessment of the tsunami of data.
“It is indeed a wave,” he said, adding that for companies like Wombat, it’s “like being in a Formula 1 race all the time.”
Most financial data, Moore explained, is transmitted using technology developed in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s and “there is a lot of legacy stuff that is not that easy to change.”
Wells agrees, but added that even better software isn’t always the answer.
“When you think how telecommunications works, there are different boxes here and there and different bits of software,” he said. Streamlining the entire system is as much a priority as speed, he said.
“Every so often a company will come along saying ‘we’re a bit special because we’re a bit faster,’ ” Wells continued.
He said that larger players such as Reuters and Bloomberg with far greater resources will continue to dominate by ultimately tempting the genius of the smaller companies such as Wombat to jump aboard.
Wombat Consulting, Moore said, is playing things cautiously for the moment, but the company has expanded. A Belfast office opened in late May that will eventually employ 30 software engineers and data technicians recruited in the province.
In Belfast, Moore said, he has found the best pool of talent “in the English-speaking world.”
Leading the Belfast team are Conall McGleenan, development center manager, and Conor Allen, product manager, Wombat’s universal feed handler. Also in the mix is Kieran Northime from Limerick, whose experience with banking systems in Australia and Indonesia is invaluable, Moore said.
It’s an aspect of Moore’s approach to business that took him back home to look for talent.
“We’re hiring world-class guys in Ireland,” he said. “The quality of life is so high in Northern Ireland that many of these guys prefer to stay there rather than move to places like New York or London.”
Of Wombat’s prospects, Jeff Wells said smaller companies with a good product needed to “work hard at it and respond to the customer’s needs. The ultimate measurement in this area is what the customer says.”