The Wisdom of Crowds: Open Source for Middleware

Feargal O’Sullivan and Jamie Hill of NYSE Technologies discuss OpenMAMA, the open source middleware Agnostic Messaging API they hope will expedite innovation in services, reduce vendor lock-in and minimize implementation time and cost.

Solving a Problem
Choosing a market data vendor because of their API alone is not sound practice. The issue of how to come up with a standard way of accessing market data that allows clients to select a vendor for any range of reasons – other than the API that the vendor happens to offer – has been a struggle for a long time. Something that should be low on any decision-making tree has unfortunately tended to be much more important. There are a number of different consolidated market vendors, including some obvious names like Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg and there is also a range of direct feeds or ticker plant vendors, where instead of going to a consolidator, feeds are accessed directly from an individual exchange.

In selecting a vendor, users must write all their code to suit that vendor’s particular way of accessing the data. Changing to a different vendor requires opening up the source code and altering everything to match how this other vendor wants to access the market data. With a consolidated feed for broad international access and a direct feed for low latency algo trading in US equities, for example, many users have to write according to two to four different APIs. This has been a significant problem for the industry and with OpenMAMA we are trying to drive the industry towards a standard.

User Base
This API is an eight-year-old standard that was initially developed by NYSE Technologies as the Middleware Agnostic Messaging API (MAMA), and it is quite heavily deployed in the financial services industry; close to 200 clients already use this API in their custom applications, so today it has an established installed base. We have opened that up and made it a standard by taking the source code for the APIs these firms are using today and provided it to The Linux Foundation, which will physically host the code as a neutral body.

During this process we worked with multiple parties that would not ordinarily use our API. Since the launch of OpenMAMA on 31 October 2011, one of the key factors to this being taken seriously as an open installation, was getting the right level of adoption. Before we launched, we approached a number of customers, other vendors and competitors, out of whom we established our launch partners J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Exegy, Fixnetix and EMC. These launch partners, along with NYSE Technologies, formed a steering committee to drive the direction and the future of OpenMAMA.

From that point forth, each of those organizations who are part of that committee has a stake in Open MAMA. The API is open source under the LGPL 2.1 licence, so it is now owned by the open source community. With participation from Interactive Data, Dealing Object Technologies and TS-Associates as well, we now have a group ten strong and it is a global mix comprising different industries. Whereas before the API was driven largely by NYSE Technologies and our commercial use cases, now it is being driven forward as an industry standard. The more people we have to adopt and participate, the higher the likelihood of achieving that.