NYSE Technologies Opens Up Trading Technology with Middleware as Open Source

As the first week of November 2011 began, the New York Stock Exchange Technologies rolled out its new open source & standards middleware in a push to further make the trading markets vendor neutral. That a firm so reliant on smoothly functioning and secure technology has done this provides another great validation for open source technology.  NYSE Technologies is no amateur to open source as they have been building and solving technology gaps within the global trading market for many years.

http://nysetechnologies.nyx.com/data-technology/openmama

The NYSE’s move allows banks and trade firms to combat the rising volume of transactional data as well as allow market participants to openly develop software code for the parts of trading platform that deal with reliably moving data from one organization to another.  The Linux Foundation, which runs many of the world’s largest open source projects, will host and govern the project.  The move to open source & standards also removes the issues of integrating different vendors’ solutions and applications and frees them from vendor lock in licensing agreements.

Closing the Knowledge Gap on Open Source Security

The NYSE’s move refutes two of the principal objections to adoption of open source technology: security and reliability. Traditional software vendors have often attempted to raise fear and doubt about open source since it is not developed in the “lab.” But the growing transition by NYSE Technologies to open source validates the inherently rigorous development phase the solutions actually go through. The average open source solution begins its life within a community of developers with a shared purpose or problem.  From there the application grows, develops, and matures, all the while the security and issues are being addressed and worked out, in a transparent fashion.  By the time the finished product goes to market it has been tried and proven by the community.  The technology is beta-tested in many cases by thousands of users.  Now consider the traditional model.  A team of developers works toward a requirements document and goes through code reviews and testing.  However appealing such a process seems, it can never provide the rigor that testing at greater scale by real users does.  That’s why the real trial and error phase typically only begins when paying customers start to use the solution.  It’s sort of like the difference between diagramming football plays on the whiteboard and running them in a game.  What looks good to our rational minds often does not work out so well in competitive reality.  And customers suffer for it: the support and patchwork required for traditionally developed products creates delays and drives up costs to the user while repairs are made. Meanwhile, security gaps and reliability issues exist.  

So, the next time you are waiting for a Windows security patch to download and install, check out the stock market to see if the NYSE is still trading and consider which technology is more secure and robust.