Colocation Products Featured Article

Telx, a company specializing in colocation and interconnection for the financial industry, and ACTIV Financial, a market data content and technologies provider, are partnering to offer highly secure, low-latency market data and colocation services to the financial industry.

 

Inside Telx's facility at 111 8th Avenue, which acts as a hub for more than 80 percent of the exchange-directed fiber connections running in New York, ACTIV will house its ticker plant and aggregated market data feeds. Since exchange data is already routed through this facility, ACTIV has capitalized on Telx's superior connectivity to streamline the distance market data travels and deliver customers best-in-class speed for a reliable, high-performance trading solution.

 

In addition, by keeping its network connections in New York City, ACTIV reduces latency and potential points of network failure and helps to ensure maximum network up-time and minimum delays in traffic.

 

TMCnet had the opportunity to discuss this new partnership with Telx's Rose Klimovich, vice president of product development and engineering.

 

RK: Activ is a leader and innovator in the area of market data companies. This partnership will allow Activ and its customers to put their equipment in Telx facilities and thereby be closer to the financial exchanges and thereby get better performance and lower latency.

 

RK: Telx has a diversified customer base of – service providers, enterprises, media companies, SaaS (News - Alert) providers as well as the financial industry. We try to form ecosystems around each of these sectors to provide them the service that they need. The financial industry is an example of a sector where we build out to the exchanges to give our customers better service. We feel that our sites are strategic for hubs that the financial community can take advantage of to lower latency and costs.

 

RK: Activ chose Telx because of our reliable, secure facilities and the closeness to the Exchanges and other financial providers.

 

RK: This allows present and future Telx customers to get better performance to the exchanges as well as a reliable and secure location to put their servers, storage devises and network equipment. To also take advantage of our 400+ providers, access to SFTI, as well as access to active for market data.

 

RK: Telx is a network neutral colocation provider. We have 400 service providers and other businesses that a customer can connect to in the New York metro area. This allows a customer a choice of network providers. This helps lower the customer cost and allows them to get the type of networking and the performance they need for their applications.

 

RK: In the financial industry, a small delay can result in a large financial hit. According to The TABB Group’s Report, Financial Connectivity: Creating a Frictionless Global Marketplace, “Algorithmic trading and direct market access are the biggest disruptors in modern day markets going from virtually 0% to 31% of institutional order flow over the past five years.” In addition, Information Week2 states that, “a 1-millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100M a year to a major brokerage firm.” Financial companies operating in the technology driven environment all run into the same challenge: how do they keep up with the demand of growing market data and transactions while operating efficiently with the lowest latency possible?

 

RK: Even thought there are stresses in the financial community, the need for fast trading is as important as ever. Using the right colocation facility is cheaper and more flexible than building out yourself and allows close proximity to other customers in the financial community.

 

A separate note, exchanges, ECN’s, and market data providers are collocated through out the NY/NJ Metro area.  Some collocate in a colocation or managed hosting site and some have their own data centers.   Based on the latency and proximity to everyone we have the ideal facilities that fit in the best scenario for proximity and latency. We also provide 1 cross connect to any service provider, carrier, or extranet provider within 24-48 hrs. This helps improve a financial company’s time to market.