SCIENCE

Bristol, UK-based network switch provider Gnodal is expanding its sales team across New York, Chicago and the UK as it looks to grow take-up of its switches among financial services firms and exchanges.

The vendor's switches are built around its custom ASIC processor that was purpose-built for high-performance computing use cases, so its initial deployments were primarily to support academic research and scientific discovery, but as a by-product of meeting that demand for high throughput in heavy computational environments, the chip is also capable of ultra-low-latency processing of small packets, says Gnodal chief executive Bob Fernander.

Gnodal's switches also include built-in congestion avoidance capabilities, by automatically detecting traffic patterns and directing packets in and out of different ports to avoid bottlenecks, as well as built-in validation of packets to ensure the sequence is correct, says Atchison Frazer, chief marketing officer at Gnodal. "In financials, the last thing you want to do, even if it's faster, is to pass on corrupted frames. Evil fast is still evil," Frazer says, adding that even with these checks in place, the switch is able to process frames of about 100 bytes in 150 nanoseconds.

As such, the vendor is seeing growing traction among high-frequency traders and exchanges. To continue its growth in financial services, Gnodal has over the past few months appointed sales directors to oversee business development in the UK, New York and Chicago, where most of its financial clients are based, Frazer says.

Based in Bristol, Geoff Burne has joined Gnodal as director of financial services sales for EMEA, primarily focused on engaging with regional exchanges, hedge funds, investment banks and service providers, including market data vendors. Previously, Burne was director of new business at hardware messaging platform vendor Solace Systems, prior to which he was director of UK financial services sales at network technology provider Mellanox, which he joined via its acquisition of low-latency datacenter networking and switching provider Voltaire.

In New York, Gnodal has hired Garry Diemer as director of sales for the Northeast region. Prior to joining Gnodal, Diemer was director of sales at Promisec, a provider of software solutions for monitoring and managing network endpoints. Meanwhile in Chicago, Brian Crouch has been named Midwest sales director, joining Gnodal from IT technology solutions provider CDW, where he was financial services senior account manager focusing on selling and supporting low-latency solutions.

Furthermore, the vendor expects to close a new round of funding by the end of this year, and will continue to grow its sales team and bring on board people with domain expertise in order to increase its footprint in financial services, Fernander says.