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SPOTLIGHT |
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Making Composite Apps Work
I recently had the opportunity to meet with the senior IT management team of one of the largest U.S. commercial banks. This was an open, round table discussion involving multiple Silicon Valley startup companies who-like us-try to woo similar-sized enterprises into using their latest and coolest wares. The CTO started saying that in the old days, standard software was supposed to meet 80% of a firm’s need, with the remaining 20% requiring customizations to fit the firm’s process. “With packaged software these days”, he said “it is more like 50%/50%. This forces us to spend a lot of time customizing things, while we are actually trying to be more agile and more responsive to changing market conditions.”
This comment struck a chord with me. Many IT executives now understand that re-usable web services finally offer the promise to address those changing needs. Instead of buying a standard app that only does 50% of the job, the firm can build a custom application from re-usable web services. If you can buy most of the services you need, you get the best of both worlds: the fit of a custom app for less than the price of a standard app.
That’s all nice and good, but there is a big assumption built in: you must be able to purchase most of the services you need without having to customize them much. Otherwise you are back to where you started. And there lies the problem with the state of the web service industry today. Dana Gardner made it clear on his ZDNet blog last month: “There are either not many services available or the services are too general and not specific to a specialized vertical industry or a niche function.” Dana further states that 80% of those services need to be customized. This type of problem could seriously hamper the success of composite applications in IT America.
Since we have been delivering web services for a while, we saw that problem coming. This is why we not only offer a broad and deep set of integrated web services sharply focused on a specialized industry and function (financial market and industry data), but we engineer those services with the needs of the composite application designer and developer in mind. Our goal is to make those re-usable components so integration-ready that you just have to drop them “as-is” in your composite applications. We still have ways to go, but we will get there. And what’s the payoff you say? Gardner again puts it best “The higher [developers] can drive the percentage of reuse, the more scale and productivity they gain. They become the go-to organization for cost-efficient applications in a specific industry, or for specialized business processes.”
For questions and comments, please write to Xignite at ondemand@xignite.com. |
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Upcoming New Products | |
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Earnings Calendar
Xignite has partnered with Wall Street Horizon to bring your dynamic, up-to-date earnings calendar information you can
use to keep tabs on companies your care about. Wall Street Horizon is The Earnings Calendar Company(sm) – the most accurate and comprehensive original data source for US corporate earnings dates and conference call information.
This new web service complements existing services such as XigniteEstimates (earnings and sales estimates) and XigniteAnalysts (market analyst consensus information) from
Zack Investment Research, and XigniteCalendar (global economic calendar) from Econoday which we introduced earlier this year.
You will then have all data your need about economic and corporate earnings events to keep tabs on the companies and industries you care about. And you will appreciate the comfort you get from working with the most accurate information in the market.
Interbank Rates
Many of our clients have requested for us to increase our coverage of global Interbank interest rates. Today we support Interbank rates for LIBOR (London), REIBOR (Reikjavik), OIBOR (Oslo), STIBOR (Stockholm), SIBOR (Singapore), WIBOR (Warsaw), CIBOR (Copenhagen), SOFIBOR (Sofia) and EURIBOR (Euro Zone).
We are in the process of adding the following new Interbank rates. These new rates will be consolidated in a new service called XigniteInterbanks. The new Interbank rates include HIBOR (Hong Kong), MEXIBOR (Mexico City), BUBOR (Bulgaria), MIBOR (Mumbai), KORIBOR (Korea), PRIBOR (Prague), SABOR (South Africa), TAIBOR (Taipei), TURKIBOR (Turkey), CHILIBOR (Chile), TELBOR (Tel Aviv), CHIBOR (China), SHIBOR (Shanghai), JIBOR (Jakarta), KLIBOR (Kuala Lumpur), TIBOR (Tokyo), PHILLIBOR (Philippines), BKIBOR (Bangkok), and VNIBOR (Viet Nam).
Stay tuned for the next newsletter. There are many more upcoming services. If there is anything you need that you don’t find on our website, don’t hesitate to email us. What you tell us helps us identify and prioritize new developments. |
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Why SOAP Rocks! Video
SOAP has had a little bit of bad rap lately. Some people think it is too complicated compared to its cousins REST and POX (plain old XML). The truth is that it all depends on the development environment you use. To prove our point, we made this video that shows how you can integrate a web service in your application in less than 60 seconds and 3 lines of code: View Video
Web Service Enhancements
We add new arrows to our integrated quiver of financial web services almost every month. But we also constantly enhance existing services by adding new ways to get to the information you need, or adding new data sets inside existing services. It’s common for our clients not to realize that this information is newly available. Here is a quick rundown of some of the most significant enhancements of those last few months:
- Addition of all US and Canadian commodities exchanges (CBOT, CME, COMEX, NYBOT, WCE, KBT...) to XigniteFutures.
- Addition of settlement information for NYMEX swaps information in XigniteFutures.
- Addition of technical analysis functionality (moving average, MACD, EMA...) to XigniteChart.
- Addition of Base Metal Prices (Rhodium, Iridium, Ruthenium) to XigniteMetals.
- Addition of Trade-by-Trade information to XigniteQuotes.
- Addition of currency calculators to XigniteCurrencies.
- Addition of dozens of new interest rates (Treasury Composites, Muni Composites, Freddie Mac survey rates and European Central Bank rates, etc.) to XigniteRates.
- Addition of Housing Market Indicators to XigniteHousing.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need new operations or new data to increase the value you get from our web services. We pride ourselves in being able to respond to our clients quickly and effectively. |
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Mashups are all the rage these days. And let’s face it, our web services are a pretty good place to start to build some cool mashup application. Tibco, one of leading provider of AJAX development technologies and a partner of ours is throwing a mashup challenge. You not only get the opportunity to build some of the coolest mashups around but you can win a 50’ Plasma HDTV or a 30 GB iPod. Checkout the
Ultimate Mashup AjaxChallenge here. |
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Want to add a real-time currency exchange table to your web site? It can be done in just a couple lines of code.
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Dim objService as New RemoteCurrencies.XigniteCurrencies
Response.Write(objService.GetSimpleRealTimeCrossRateTableAsHTML
(“USD,JPY,GBP,EUR”,”h”,”l”,”c”))
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Where ‘h’, ‘l’, and ‘c’ are the HTML styles you want to use for column headers, line headers and cells respectively. The result will look like this and it will be refreshed with real-time information on each request.
| 08/07 7:20 |
EUR |
GBP |
JPY |
USD |
| EUR |
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0.677365 |
161.394997 |
1.368550 |
| GBP |
1.476400 |
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238.299995 |
2.020600 |
| JPY |
0.006196 |
0.004196 |
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0.008480 |
| USD |
0.730700 |
0.494902 |
117.925003 |
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Meet Us at the Following Events:
Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 in the Capital Markets Industry
New York City, September 17
Gartner Web Innovation Summit
Las Vegas, September 19-21
Other Events:
SOA Master Classes
Sep 11-13, 2007,
St. Louis, MO & Austin, TX
Flex Developer Bootcamp
September 23, 2007,
Santa Clara, CA
Rich Web Experience Conference
September 6-8, 2007,
San Jose, CA
AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West
September 23-26, 2007
Santa Clara Convention Center, CA
Web 2.0 Summit Conference
October 17-19, 2007,
San Francisco, CA
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Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to be an integral part of it.
If you are a master of your own trade, looking for an early startup to sweat into an apparent overnight success, Xignite is for you! We are a small but thriving company full of smart and motivated people. We work hard and are passionate about changing the life of our clients and making the delivery of web services the business model of the future.
For more information on Careers at Xignite click here. |
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