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Connect Newsletter |
Dear Xignite User,
As this is our first newsletter of the year, the entire Xignite team would like to wish you a happy, healthy, prosperous and belated New Year!
The end of 2008 has been an interesting period to say to the least. Only six months ago, who would have expected to see oil prices at $40/barrel, the Dow Jones Industrial at $8000, Federal Fund rates under .15%, and Lehman Brothers delisted from the NYSE?
But as an up-and-coming player in our industry, we make it a discipline to be optimistic. We are actually finding quite a few reasons to be positive about 2008 and the year to come (starting with the cool updated look of our web site):
Most exciting was the launch in November of Xignite new BATS Last Sale service on Forbes.com. Considered the home page for the world's business leaders, Forbes.com is a valuable resource for comprehensive financial market information and the latest business news. At a time when the demand for market information is at its peak due to the current financial crisis, Forbes.com recognized that its readers needed real-time information. After careful review, Forbes.com selected Xignite for its on-demand, Web services delivery model, because it allowed the company to deploy real-time financial data rapidly on Forbes.com without the costs of new IT infrastructure. By working with Xignite, Forbes.com saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of development time.
Specifically Xignite powers a complete set of real-time widgets and provides continuously updating real-time in-line quotes embedded inside Forbes unique editorial articles."Xignite's Web services fundamentally change the way financial data is delivered. It is simpler to manage and more cost-effective than ever before," said Jeff Bauer, Creative Director at Forbes.com. "Not only did Xignite eliminate the costs and headaches of building the service ourselves, they were able to deliver the content our readers needed faster than any other vendor. Their sales and support responsiveness has been fantastic."
What is most interesting Forbes.com is one of the leaders of a general industry trend. We expect that many other web properties and financial institutions will leverage cloud technology to provide users with more up-to-date information at a fraction of the cost of legacy technologies.
Forbes.com widgets were actually powered by a new service we launched last month: The XigniteBATSLastSale service provides real-time quotes of the last sale price for the more than 8,000 U.S. equities traded on the BATS Exchange. Soon to be released, the XigniteBATSRealTime service will expand this offering with more in-depth real-time data, such as bid-ask prices and charts.
"Since opening for business in 2006, BATS has focused on making markets better in many ways, such as promoting lower market data costs," said BATS CEO Joe Ratterman. "Now, as many financial services companies face tightening IT budgets, we are pleased to partner with Xignite to provide more accessible and affordable applications for in-depth real-time data and last sale price quotes for all market participants."
As the first and only provider of a zero-infrastructure, one-minute integration solution to access BATS revolutionary data, we have quite a few reasons to be excited about the year ahead.
Also thrilling was the launch of our Amazon EC2 based web services. Until last summer, Xignite operated its web services at 100% within our own San Jose based data center. While very reliable (our open published 2008 uptime is 99.92%), that data center required significant investments in order to keep up with the increased demand of our growing client base. This is why we decided to move some of our infrastructure to the cloud! As a cloud services provider ourselves, it was a very natural expansion. The use of Amazon web services is not only giving us the ability to scale our services very cost effectively, it is also allowing us to provide instant scalability during peak market activity.
What this means is that quick progress in cloud computing is pushing the boundaries of relevance for on-demand technologies beyond all initial expectations. It used to be that if a firm like Forbes.com needed to provide real-time data to their users, they had no other choice than building a massive infrastructure to collect, parse, and manage complex exchange real-time feeds. But thanks to web services and cloud computing, they no longer to. Web services like the Xignite BATS-powered web service used by Forbes.com are so simple to implement and deploy and so massively scalable that one of the top investor portal in the world can implement unique and differentiating functionality in a matter of hours.
With the economy in recession and the financial industry looking for cost-savings, we believe 2009 will be a landmark year for cloud-powered, financial web service adoption. Web services require no upfront infrastructure investments, they can be integrated into your existing applications in less than one minute, and their pay-as-you-go model allows them to expand and contract in harmony with your business. A solution for the times if there was one!
Stephane Dubois, CEO
650-655-3701
XigniteGlobalQuotes is the first on-demand web service of its kind. It provides delayed quote information for the world's biggest global exchanges including the London Stock Exchange, the German Deutsche Boerse, the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange if India. We already provide end of day and historical data for global securities with XigniteGlobalHistorical (see the list here) many of you have been requesting delayed quotes. Check out XigniteGlobalQuotes today.
Many of you have requested an easy way to access detailed index component information. We partnered with Telekurs to create XigniteIndexComponents. This service provides up-to-date index composition information on many exchange including key Dow Jones, S&P and Russell indices. Additional indices can be added to the service upon request.
Although we enjoy launching brand new services, many of the enhancements we provide are more subtle. They consist of providing the additional functionality or data people need in the same web services they have grown to use and love. For instance, we added:
Due to increasing demand, we will be ramping up the number of exchanges supported by XigniteGlobalQuotes. Look for the following additions over the 2009 calendar year:
Many of you have requested a reliable corporate actions web service that would let you accurately maintain your own security master. Thanks to Xignite's recent partnership with Telekurs, we will soon introduce a corporate actions service that will not only provide accurate dividend, split and security changes information, but also cover complex transactions such as mergers, acquisitions and split-offs.
Earlier this month, kaChing--an Xignite client since January 2007--unveiled the web's largest marketplace for investing talent which enables a radically new way for individuals to invest in the stock market. kaChing was best known for its FSX application--the most popular application of its kind on Facebook--now dubbed kaChing. kaChing allows its members to find outstanding investors to emulate among more than 350,000 portfolio managers. As an SEC Registered Investment Adviser, Kaching can for the first time offer every investor the opportunity to access the returns, advice, insights and transparency previously only available to wealthy.
Kaching is off to a great start. The company has raised an angel round from some heavy hitters in Silicon Valley, including Marc Andreessen, OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan, Benchmark Capital partner Andy Rachleff (who we know well here at Xignite), and Kleiner Perkins partner Kevin Compton. Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark, Doug Mackenzie of Kleiner, and former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz are also investors.
Kaching uses many Xignite web services to power its unique platform: XigniteHistorical, XigniteFundamentals, XigniteLogos, XigniteQuotes, but most importantly XigniteNASDAQLastSale. Using real-time quotes to allow users to trade in sync with the market was a critical requirement for the firm. Kaching was one of the first firms in the country to use the NASDAQ Last Sale service launched by NASDAQ in June and supported by Xignite since its inception.
DeMarche Associates, Inc. has teamed-up with Xignite in organizing the research data which recognizes the Best CEOs. DeMarche Associates, Inc. specializes in industry-leading corporate finance and investor relations practices as well as defined benefit and defined contribution consulting. They offer an array of research and consulting services designed to help progressive organizations better understand the key factors that affect stock price. Their Best CEOs awards program is a byproduct of this research. After crunching a lot of data (delivered by Xignite web services) using their breakthrough formula, DeMarche identified Christopher L. Coccio, Ph.D. of SONO-TEK Corporation as one of the best in the nation.
Check out those recent articles, blogs, podcasts and videocasts from Xignite:
Here are relevant industry events for the year. Those we plan to attend are shown in bold. Come and meet us!:
Check out these select articles to stay abreast of what's going on in our field:
Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to become a part of our team.
If you are a master of your own trade, looking for an opportunity to be part of an uncapped and successful company, Xignite is for you! We are a thriving company full of smart and motivated people. We work hard and are passionate about changing the life of our clients. We are creating the new business model of the future with the delivery of Web Services.
For more information on Careers at Xignite click here.