Sinara promotes vendor independent Market Data APIs

Sinara Consultants, a London based software house specialising in market data systems, has called for the adoption of more open and vendor-agnostic sets of APIs to be utilised for market data systems.

Speaking at an industry panel in London, Sinara founding director Steve Dobb outlined the issues surrounding the use of APIs and how consumers of market data can benefit from being able to rely on APIs that protect them from so-called ‘vendor lock-in’.

Steve Dobb commented: “It is useful to look at this in terms of the costs to the client and how they get the most out of their investment.  If a client invests the effort and cost in using a set of APIs for developing and integrating their applications with their market data system, they want to make sure they get the most out of that investment.  One way of achieving this is to make the APIs vendor-agnostic and consistent across internal/external data where possible, which is the approach Sinara have taken. A good set of APIs provides a level of abstraction or ‘insulation layer’ between the application and the data source. The ideal is for a client to build their applications independent of data vendors and have free and easy access to their own internal data.”

Sinara’s own Market Data Platform, SinaraMDP, is a comprehensive collection, management and distribution platform for low-latency real-time streaming data. It is used by trading exchanges and data consumers for ticker plants, feeding trading systems and large-scale streaming distribution. The architecture and APIs hide the complexity of the data sources, which allows clients to add new sources or change vendors with minimum impact on their downstream applications.

Sinara are constantly expanding the APIs on SinaraMDP to allow customers to build innovative desktop and mobile applications that can access both real-time and historic time-series data. These APIs are available for both Windows and Linux allowing developers to use C++, Java and .NET as well as common mobile platforms to build and integrate their applications.