Trade Desks and Network Personnel Can Reduce Market Risk, Speed Troubleshooting with FIX Response Time Monitoring in the Context of Overall Application Performance Data

READING, UK – June 3, 2008 – To help trade desk personnel manage the performance of low latency trading networks, NetQoS® Inc. launched Trade Monitor, a product obtained through the acquisition of Helium Systems (announced today in a separate release: NetQoS Acquires Helium Systems for FIX Protocol Monitoring). This addition to the NetQoS Performance Center product family makes NetQoS the only vendor that offers a passive Financial Information eXchange (FIX) response time monitoring product with a comprehensive network and application performance management suite.

Trade desk personnel are increasingly responsible for ensuring fast and reliable trade executions via FIX-based applications amid escalating volumes of trade data and the race to build high performance, low latency architectures. NetQoS Trade Monitor captures and analyses FIX protocol financial transactions to help trade desk personnel measure latency, speed troubleshooting, and reconstruct trade executions. The FIX protocol is a messaging standard developed specifically for the real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions.

“The key to effective management is to have real-time understanding of FIX application performance in context with other network and application performance-related metrics that may contribute to latency issues and impact trade execution,” said Robb Van Eman, NetQoS Trade Monitor product manager. “NetQoS delivers this overall picture of network and application health across an organisation and, unlike some solutions, Trade Monitor provides both network-based metrics and the business application data that allows for rapid trade search and reconstruction for trade desk troubleshooting.”

Nico Technology, a provider of network management tools specialising in the finance sector, recently became a NetQoS partner to resell Trade Monitor in the UK. Nico personnel have deep experience in the financial services industry and will market Trade Monitor to any financial trading organisation that has a FIX connection to an exchange.

“Regulations such as MiFID challenge financial organisations to have greater visibility into and transparency of their trades. NetQoS Trade Monitor provides the visibility and evidence needed to prove best execution,” said Paul Wells, technical director for Nico. “In addition, as a network appliance NetQoS Trade Monitor can be deployed in minutes to collect trade information nonintrusively and provide alerts in an easy to read, manageable, and cost-effective manner.”

NetQoS Trade Monitor reduces exposure to market risk by providing real-time notification of latency, connection, and session-level metrics to accelerate troubleshooting and dissect trade executions. For decision support, Trade Monitor offers both summary reports and detailed analytics to identify the best and worst trade execution times, track all orders, and perform retrospective analysis to locate and reconstruct any order.  For each FIX connection, Trade Monitor displays the pertinent message level details including the FIX order chain, time stamps, and latency statistics.

In addition to trade desk personnel, network and operations personnel can use Trade Monitor in conjunction with the modules of the NetQoS Performance Center to ensure optimal application delivery and network performance. The combination yields specific capabilities such as:

·          Real-time service level reports on trading performance

·          SNMP alerts useful in the network operations centre for troubleshooting infrastructure issues

·          Cisco IP SLA tests for hop-by-hop network analysis

·          Cisco NetFlow data analysis and reports for visibility into trade message volume and traffic composition

Network architects can also use NetQoS Performance Center and Trade Monitor data to build low latency architectures.

NetQoS Trade Monitor is available now at a starting price of $100,000 for up to 100 FIX connections. For more information, visit http://www.netqos.com/solutions/trade_monitor/index.html