NetScout has introduced nGenius Trading Intelligence, providing real-time, end-to-end visibility into trade order execution and transaction performance for financial trading environments. Leveraging highly scalable and deployment-proven nGenius InfiniStream appliances, nGenius Trading Intelligence tracks and correlates trade order flows across end-to-end networks enabling capital market organizations to better optimize the performance and timing precision of financial trades. The solution dramatically simplifies the seemingly impossible task of correlation and analysis of the impact of performance and latency for complex trading transactions while eliminating the need for a time-consuming and costly programming effort. nGenius Trading Intelligence provides granular real-time and historical comparative analysis of transactions according to markets, fungibles, sessions and specific trading stations.

Trading networks are among the most complex and demanding Information Technology (IT) environments in operation today. Performance and transaction latency are critical success factors to trading outcomes, and trading-focused organizations invest significantly in sophisticated network technology to achieve improved performance at microsecond levels. Despite these investments, there is still a lack of accurate and granular information on where to focus latency reduction efforts to improve overall performance of order execution flow. Today's financial transactions travel across global networks through multiple physical locations and devices (hops), using many formats and protocols. With each hop, the complexity of a trade transaction increases. This complexity and constant transformation of a single transaction makes correlating metrics from multiple hops extremely difficult, and organizations struggle with amassing what is currently a collection of disconnected and incomprehensible metrics. Until now, trading firms have had to either perform manual metric correlation or undertake expensive custom programming projects to translate and correlate hop-by-hop metrics in order to gain any value from existing latency management solutions.

The nGenius Trading Intelligence solution addresses this crucial problem with a high-performance latency management solution purpose-built for trading environments to respond to the specialized visibility requirements of exchanges, buy-side and sell-side capital market firms. The solution exposes microsecond latency metrics to pinpoint latency and performance impacts caused by specific network links, gateways, Smart Order Routers (SORs), feed handlers and matching engines. The solution's dynamic multi-hop correlation capabilities deliver granular nanosecond latency breakouts for each monitored hop, enabling IT staff to quickly isolate and identify latency bottlenecks. Supporting dozens of statistical groupings, the solution provides granular latency and performance comparisons against all historical performance data between multiple execution venues, network paths and trading stations, for comparison and analysis of performance and responsiveness.

"Our clients rely on us to provide the most reliable, lowest latency systems in the business in order to create a competitive business environment for trades. NetScout has been highly effective in providing performance and latency assurance for our high volume, asynchronous network," said Saro Jahani, CIO at National Stock Exchange. "The automated correlations, the comparative data analysis and the ability to monitor multi-hop network nodes with the new nGenius Trading Intelligence solution will provide us the proper tools to empower our IT staff to manage our network more effectively and strategically."

The nGenius Trading Intelligence solution employs an innovative and highly flexible "Chain-of-Custody" modeling approach that provides a cohesive and logical representation of the trade order path as it traverses from the trader's console, through the trading network, and back to the trader with the resulting order acknowledgement. Highly precise views represent all interrelationships involved in trade transactions and correlate hand-offs to enable accurate measurement of latency at each point in the transaction cycle. Latency impact can be viewed on a round trip basis or in each direction, from the trade initiator to the execution venue and back with a single mouse click. This unique approach dramatically simplifies the task of collecting, processing and correlating performance and latency metrics for these complex transactions. As a result, organizations can seamlessly isolate and view latency and performance metrics across message, transaction and network tiers to quickly pinpoint problems points along the transaction path, to identify where latency optimization efforts should be focused to improve trade velocity.

The nGenius Trading Intelligence solution simplifies and automates the process of constructing these dynamic, unified end-to-end views using easy-to-use out of the box templates to independently architect a comprehensive Chain-of-Custody model. Compressing what used to take weeks of custom programming effort to just a few mouse clicks, trade engineering staff can now quickly and accurately associate each hop of the transaction path to identify the dynamic multiprotocol, multi-format relationships of the typical trade order execution event. This can save the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial deployment costs while enabling greater agility as changes to the trading environment occur, such as the introduction of new trading venues, new protocols or new trading platforms and devices.

Proven Scalability Addresses High Data Volumes

The nGenius Trading Intelligence solution leverages the nGenius InfiniStream appliance, widely deployed across thousands of enterprise and service provider network segments, to collect, analyze and store mass volumes of trading and market data feed traffic on a distributed basis. Tightly integrated with the nGenius Trading Intelligence application, these high performance appliances provide secure, highly scalable and reliable deep packet capture and analysis capabilities to ensure the integrity and compatibility of the data collected. To address the high volume traffic and complexity of trading environments, the nGenius InfiniStream appliance generates carrier-class Extended Data Records (XDRs) that feed into the Chain of Custody models to track and correlate complex multiprotocol, multi-format trade transactions across distributed environments.

Deployed as Part of a Unified Solution

The nGenius Trading Intelligence solution can be deployed as a stand-alone latency management solution or can be deployed as an integral part of the nGenius Service Assurance Solution. Unlike many point latency monitoring products, this integration approach enables organizations to leverage their substantial investments in analytics and intelligent data source technology to extend incremental and comprehensive end-to-end service delivery management capabilities across their network environment. When used in conjunction with other modules of the nGenius Service Assurance solution, benefits include a wide range of service delivery management capabilities including availability and performance management capacity planning, service validation and forensic analysis. In addition, organizations can monitor and analyze a comprehensive range of simultaneous market data feeds that are crucial to making split-second trading decisions. The nGenius solution provides visibility into network microburst activity to identify packet loss and out-of-sequence packets to alert users to performance issues, and recognizes more than 800 capital market data feed formats and protocols. Supported protocols include ARCA, CME, LSE, NASDAQ, NSX, NYSE, SIAC, TIBCO and messaging platforms and feed handlers based on TIBCOP, 29West, IBM LLM/PGM, and can support custom or home-grown protocols.

"The financial services market has long been a strategic area of focus for NetScout. Our nGenius and Sniffer technologies are currently deployed at hundreds of financial institutions and more than 20 major exchanges. These organizations have come to trust NetScout to help them assure and optimize their most vital asset," said Steven Shalita, vice president, marketing, NetScout. "The introduction of nGenius Trading intelligence is a strategic progression of our commitment to the Capital Markets sector. As we continue to drive technology innovation, we also look for ways to cross-leverage our technology development efforts. This solution extends our recently introduced carrier-class xDR technology to address the unique challenges of multi-hop correlation in the financial trading environment."

Availability

Availability for the nGenius Trading Intelligence solution is planned for late July, 2010. The solution uses existing nGenius InfiniStream appliances for all trading metrics and can be deployed with the nGenius Performance Manager, nGenius Service Delivery Manager and Sniffer Analysis modules for a comprehensive Unified Service Delivery Management approach. NetScout will be demonstrating the nGenius Trading Intelligence solution at SIFMA Financial Service Technology Expo at the Hilton New York Hotel in New York City - booth number 1852 on June 22 through 24, 2010. Please contact NetScout or your NetScout authorized reseller for more information.