OpenMama, the project developed to allow financial services firms to move more freely between market data technology and content vendors, today announces its re-launch boasting a new advisory group, increased vendor coverage and, for the first time, the ability to bridge data to and from Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform (TREP) using a completely open source stack.
Hosted by the Linux Foundation, OpenMAMA delivers a high-performance messaging interface that enables financial institutions to develop applications against a single cross platform API, thus reducing vendor lock-in and potentially lowering costs by enabling a choice of market data sources and technologies.
Following a period of product consolidation and enhancement during 2014, the open source project continues to attract a growing community of financial institutions including tier one investments banks, developers and vendors. The OpenMAMA Steering Committee, which oversees the development and implementation of the project, comprises J.P.Morgan, SR Labs, Tick42 and Solace Systems, the Canadian headquartered middleware company, which joined this year.
OpenMAMA re-launches with an all-new advisory group of five tier-one investment banks. This complements the Steering Committee, which inputs directly into the roadmap and drives requirements and progress. The new advisory group reduces barriers to participation as it allows financial institutions to influence the OpenMAMA roadmap and project direction without any formal commitments to the Project.
The project has seen a recent increase in downloads of the API by the developer community, indicating stronger interest from financial services firms in developing applications using OpenMAMA. This year, multiple new firms have actively engaged with the API, while market data technology vendors such as SR Labs, Tick42, Exegy and Redline Trading Solutions have continued to support OpenMAMA and develop connections for different market data sources. Most notably Tick42 recently announced a bridge that allows applications written to the OpenMAMA API to subscribe, publish and contribute market data via the Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform (TREP, formerly known as RMDS).
Jamie Hill, VP of Product Management at SR Labs and the OpenMAMA Steering Committee Co-ordinator said, “Since it launched in 2011, the OpenMAMA project has been growing steadily as a credible open source initiative, as more and more developers within market data vendors and banks are taking the API and creating truly open innovations. Building on a proven programming interface, for which experienced development resources are readily available in the marketplace, financial services firms can now improve time to market and concentrate resources on the creation of original components that differentiate them in the marketplace. Currently we are seeing multiple examples of firms successfully embracing OpenMAMA and joining the open source community, cutting the costs of running their legacy systems.”
“The Linux Foundation is proud to host OpenMAMA as a Collaborative Project,” added Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, the Linux Foundation. “After several years of post-crisis turmoil, the financial services industry is now having to modernise its approach to technology and become more responsive to regulation. Open source initiatives like OpenMAMA, can help the finance industry do this and we look forward to seeing this collaboration continue to grow.”