As part of West Highland’s evolution and as a natural extension of our offerings, West Highland provides application development services and custom enterprise applications written to leverage many of the top vendor provide APIs. West Highland has been engaged to work on a number of projects such as Intelligent Data Platform, Abstraction Layer technology and Market Data Cache.
As the cost of market data continues to increase along with its demand, firms realize the need to break the dependency on a single vendor. Duplication of data and the subsequent redundant charges for multiple accesses to the same data set have driven the need to create a central repository that normalizes all data sets and delivers them to a common interface. West Highland has built abstraction layer technology to achieve this objective. The benefit is cost reduction, de-duplication of data sets and vendor independence.
With the introduction of social media and growth in the “FinTech” sector, a lot of new data vendors have been surfacing. Every new data vendor is targeting the existing market data highway. In order to do that, the most common way of accessing the “highway” is through a feed handler.
Clients engage West Highland to create feed handlers for specific niche use cases of new market data vendors that have alternative data sets. The feed handlers allow the client to access and normalize data across existing market data distribution plants or adhere to internal custom API’s.
The Market Data Cache evolved from our Intelligent Data Platform project. This development allows West Highland to successfully handle the challenge of streaming realtime data.
Functionality
The Market Data Cache subscribes to real time data and stores each request from any vendor in cache, distribute it, and control who receives the data. The data requests are tracked, logged and reported on for relevant usage metrics. This information plays a key role in optimizing data usage and controlling costs. Providing this level of oversight gives market data administrators the ability to evaluate the real value of the data subscriptions, user or application usage patterns.
When West Highland created its Market Data Framework, we established a precursor to a data lake. The Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) allows clients to cache and access all reference data from a single cache and immutable store. All clients have a myriad of referential data sources and queries into multiple security master files which are time consuming and extremely difficult to manage.
Much of the data that exists is redundant. As a result, clients end-up paying for data and licenses multiple times making the total cost of ownership exorbitant. The IDP allows the client to get the data they need, eliminate the redundancies, normalize the symbiology and store all of that information into perpetuity for future exercises.
Our Application Development platform is designed to support your infrastructure, we know what your end users are doing and we know what your application developers are doing.”
STEVEN R. ROE
CEO, West Highland
