SunGard Enhances Front Arena FIX/FAST Offering

SunGard today announced that it has enhanced the functionality of its Front Arena FIX engine to provide support for the new FAST FIX protocol for trade transaction messaging. Front Arena, SunGard’s multi-asset class, integrated trading solution, has been integrated with the FAST Virtual Machine (FVM) from Pantor Engineering, a specialist provider of advanced solutions for building and monitoring transaction systems.

The FAST Protocol is a data compaction methodology that offers high compression rates for extreme bursts of market data without negatively affecting latency. Through the integration with the FAST Virtual Machine, Front Arena’s FIX engine will support both the FAST FIX protocol and the classic FIX protocol. SunGard’s first targeted production use is the upcoming FAST FIX interface for trading on the Nordic Exchange, scheduled for launch mid 2008.

Rolf Andersson, chief executive officer of Pantor, commented, “Front Arena is a state-of-the-art system with a large base of advanced and demanding users. FAST Virtual Machine (FVM) provides Front Arena with a complete high performance, low latency FAST implementation.”

Nils Undén, chief technology officer at SunGard’s Front Arena business unit, said, “We see a trend of exchanges moving to FAST FIX which propels the development of FAST and FIX for exchange trading. Pantor has played an instrumental role in this development, making this partnership a logical decision for us. Bringing FVM into Front Arenawill help us to continue to deliver outstanding value to our customers. We plan to use the updated FIX engine to support the introduction of FIX at the Nordic Exchange as well as for the Swiss Exchange which will similarly extend its FIX usage during 2008.“