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“No other vendor met our requirements,” said Dhiru Patel, chief quantitative strategist at Thomas Weisel Partners. “Beyond its sheer performance and flexibility, Vhayu Velocity can quickly write custom analytics. We were also able to evaluate the engine over the Internet, there was a quick, no-cost, proof-of-concept and they're providing the high-end consulting and dedicated support we expected.”
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» How many clients are currently using the product?

As of January 2008, there are 59 implementations of Velocity in production, in North America, Europe, and Asia. 8 of the top 10 tier-1 financial institutions covering major global investment banks, the largest online brokerage, highly regarded hedge-funds, the world’s largest Commodity Trading Advisor, and proprietary trading groups at leading global financial institutions. Most installations are strategic market data infrastructure solutions supporting diverse applications on the same underlying platform and systems. We are the leading provider of a real-time & historical tick processing and persistence technology – and based on market and client/prospect feedback, we are unique in this specific value proposition.


» How is your proprietary database structure different from a relational database?

The Velocity database is proprietary, optimized for size & performance. It is not relational (as this would impact the performance negatively). The powerful combination of our breakthrough technology in the areas of compression and advanced caching alleviate any concern regarding the ability to handle increasing volume of market data.

Vhayu is an integrated solution that can store and analyze both real-time and historical data from the same engine. Vhayu Velocity manages in-memory and on-disk data seamlessly from the user's/query's perspective. The system uses high-performance indexing, caching, disk and memory look-up technologies to provide the optimal query performance even over large amounts of data.


» What feeds does Vhayu support?

Vhayu can support any data feed. Vhayu Velocity ships with out of the box support for most major data vendors or direct exchange feeds. New feed handlers are easily developed for clients as needed on a professional services basis or by the customer via a feed handler SDK.


» Does Velocity provide built-in data mapping utilities?

Velocity provides a flexible instrument listing and symbology mapping interface to control the data-subscription from input sources. In addition, Velocity also handles broadcast feeds which allow access to all of the available instruments. The symbology functionality allows users to easily manage symbol changes, new symbols that are added and old symbols that are deleted. Velocity supports a symbology-mapping mechanism that allows an end-user to define any alternative symbology to be used for data queries. For the addition of new symbols, a change is required to get the upstream feed to provide the data for the new symbols to Velocity’s feed handler. This may require adding the symbol to a subscription list being maintained by the Feed handler – this would be the case if the upstream feed is a per-stock subscription based feed as opposed to a wildcard/broadcast/fire-hose based feed. Once the feed handler receives the data for the new symbol, the downstream components create an internal representation to track it automatically.


» What are the asset classes you support?

Velocity can support any asset class. We have clients in production using Velocity for equities, options, futures, FX and fixed income.


» Can Velocity handle multiple data feeds?

The Velocity Broadcast Servers can handle multiple concurrent data feeds from different feed vendors.


» What is the maximal time resolution of your product? How are time stamps constructed?

Velocity supports sub-millisecond time. With this flexibility Velocity can take any time stamp from the exchange and simply store this with the data. The database key includes the symbol and time along with other necessary data for the record being stored. In addition Velocity stores additional “sequence numbers” allowing us to recreate a tick stream at a higher resolution than the time field given to it by the exchange/feed.


» What are the hardware and software requirements?

Vhayu Velocity runs dual or quad core, 64-bit Windows 2003 servers offering the best price/performance ratio.


» How do you scale?

Velocity scales linearly thus enabling customers to scale efficiently as the volume of data, complexity of analytics, and the number of users increase. There is no limit to the number of users that can be supported by Velocity. The system scales quickly and economically by adding more processors and more RAM.


» How is your fault tolerance architected?

Vhayu Velocity is an enterprise solution with built in redundancy and automatic fail over throughout. We employ a primary and secondary set-up making it possible for Vhayu Velocity to continue operation in the event of possible component failures. As an added measure of protection disaster recovery sites can be set-up with a similar primary and secondary set-up. The disaster recovery site will collect and provide all tick and quote data as a back-up source. In addition Vhayu Velocity can constantly monitor its input data sources and send out alerts when a feed source failure is detected. Vhayu Velocity has the ability to fail over from one feed server to another.


» How do I query your engine?

Velocity offers both an on-demand query model as well as the event-driven model, to offer maximum performance and flexibility to users. Vhayu Velocity uses extremely efficient multithreading, allowing the system to support very large numbers of users running simultaneous queries. Velocity's unique multithreaded database allows very high query performance even while capturing large volumes of streaming real-time data. We recognize that the querying performance while capturing real-time data during market hours is critical for our customers, and Vhayu is the recognized market leader in providing this capability through the use of multiple cutting edge technologies.


» What development languages can I use to interface to your APIs?

Vhayu Velocity APIs allow for easy integration to any input source and to any client application. We recognize the need for flexibility and performance and these concepts are inherent in the data access interfaces exposed by the system. Vhayu Velocity APIs enable clients to work with languages that they are familiar with eliminating the need to learn proprietary languages.

Vhayu Velocity core API is exposed in two mediums:

  • On the client side we have a scripting language that is easy to learn and uses a string based, platform independent, language independent query mechanism that allows any application anywhere on the network to request data and/or analytics at very high speeds.

    We also have client APIs exposed through high level languages (such as C++ and Java) allowing users to write and extend applications using the language with which they are familiar.
  • On the server side we have a programming interface to create libraries that can directly access the data and internal analytic API implementations.
In addition we have native implementation for 3rd party applications such as MATLAB, S-PLUS and Excel. This allows users to continue to use their favorite tools and bring in the data and results of analytics from the server for further analysis.


» What kind of scripting language do you support?

Velocity supports a client side scripting language that follows the syntax of a language called Tcl that is easy to learn and uses a string based, platform independent, language independent query mechanism that allows any application anywhere on the network to request data and/or analytics at very high speeds.

We also have client APIs exposed through high level languages (such as C++ and Java) allowing users to write and extend applications using the language with which they are familiar.


» What kind of training is provided?

Initial training is included with your Velocity license. Premium training services are available. Our approach is to have customer resources working closely with the Vhayu team at every stage of an implementation. User training is provided to customer team members at multiple stages of the implementation. This focused approach to transfer of knowledge and skills to the customer team makes the transition from implementation to production support easier. Vhayu can also provide professional consulting services to help clients integrate content build analytics or implement the Velocity solution at one or more locations.


» How do I "publish" information to an OMS or trade execution engine?

While there is no out of the box FIX connectivity, we have integrated with order management systems in the past for customers. FIX connections have been made by integrating the QuickFix libraries, other OMS via their own proprietary API (e.g. Portware, FlexTrade, InfoReach).


» What communication/messaging protocols do you support?

Velocity supports a wide variety of industry standard communication and messaging protocols.

For communication we support TCP/IP, UDP, Multicast, Tibco and more. For publish / subscribe, we support subscription over TCP/IP and publishing over TCP/IP, multicast, RV, RMDS and RFA.


» Do you interface to standard statistical packages?

Vhayu Velocity comes with interfaces to Excel (via our XLStream), MATLAB and S-PLUS.


» Do you provide GUI development tools?

Because most of our users are major brokers, hedge funds and alternative trading systems looking for the fastest performance available, coding in Velocity is done in C++ for optimal speed and flexibility. There are visualization products which come bundled with Velocity including Vhayu Vision™ as well as an Excel interface called XLStream™. Our flexibility allows easy integration to other applications including existing client applications. All Vhayu interfaces are provided in all industry standard languages.


» What are the options for clients to evaluate the product?

POCs with defined acceptance criteria on customer’s premises are available upon consultation with Vhayu. Vhayu can also provide demonstrations with notice.


» What is the expected time/effort required for implementation?

Installation of Velocity is relatively quick, with time and effort depending on the chosen architecture. Consulting and implementation efforts of client requirements can only be estimated once they have been exposed to Velocity and thoroughly analyzed. Recent case studies have shown that implementations closely aligned with POCs require 2 to 4 weeks.


» How are corrections handled?

Corrections and cancellations are applied to the data as soon as the record is received from the feed. The type of processing is dependent on the type of record but all the data required is stored.


» What historical tick data sources are supported for all the financial instruments?

The Velocity historical archives can be populated with proprietary data, TAQ data or Retuers DataScope Tick Histories. Velocity is completely cross asset and can store all item-based data from any source for the last 20 years.


» How are data gaps handled in the case of a failure?

Use of fault tolerant servers, a pair of fault tolerant Broadcast Engines, and one or several feed loggers make the probability of data loss highly unlikely. Gaps in archives can be filled later on using historical tick data files.


» Does Velocity support corporate action adjustments; if yes, how exactly

Velocity has extensive support for corporate actions including splits, reverse splits, stock dividends, cash dividends, mergers, de-mergers, etc. Velocity provides maximum flexibility and ensures historical data sanctity by retaining the original data as-is, and applying the corporate actions at very high speeds on-the-fly.


» Does Velocity support calendars?

Velocity has built-in capabilities to handle exchange holidays and weekends and runs 24x7 without system interruption.


» Does Vhayu provide benchmarking figures for Velocity?

Benchmarking a real-time analytic engine requires a precise definition of the end points of the system and components being benchmarked. Practically, a market data analytic system will include telecommunication elements, network hardware/software elements, feed software/hardware elements, feed handler libraries, feed analysis components, result distribution components, and business applications/systems.

Please note that Vhayu will be happy to arrange for specific latency benchmarks to be implemented in a well-defined environment. Velocity’s high-performance thread synchronization technologies, data schema, and event management technology differentiate us from solutions lacking the same. Since application managed event and thread synchronization do not have to resort to kernel/OS layers as heavily, the CPU cycles saved during high-performance parallel reads/writes enable Vhayu Velocity to deliver superior real-time parallel query/event processing performance.

 

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