Rapid Addition, a leading provider of trading technology to buy- and sell-side financial institutions, has joined forces with Azul Systems, the award-winning supplier of high-performance and elastic Java Virtual Machines (JVMs). Rapid Addition’s Cheetah FIX engine will support Azul’s flagship Java runtime, Zing, to offer clients low latency, jitter-free Java trading engines.

A key catalyst for the partnership is the growing client demand for increased transaction rates, consistent response times and high sustained throughput. The joint solution will provide banks and brokers with an effective, reliable and high performance trading engine that provides a competitive edge in an increasingly high velocity market.

Azul’s Zing JVM is the new performance standard for today’s high-velocity, Java-based electronic markets that demand predictable and reliable real-time behaviour. Optimized for ultra-low latency DMA, algo-trading, and order matching, Zing takes Java performance to the next level by eliminating the pauses and latency spikes that can adversely impact trading operations. Zing also includes a zero-overhead management and monitoring tool, designed for production-time diagnostics and performance analytics.

The leading FIX engine from Rapid Addition, RA-Cheetah, gives consistent low-latency performance and exceptional reliability through measurement testing. RA-Cheetah is built using Rapid Addition’s advanced low latency Generation Zero technology, which ensures no runtime garbage collection in either the JAVA or .NET implementations of the FIX engine.

Given both companies’ products aim to eliminate the effects of garbage collection it is especially impressive that the combination of Zing and Cheetah yields yet higher performance. Comparisons with Cheetah running on Oracle’s JRockit compared to other JVMs show performance increase and a meaningful reduction in latency. Yet the results of testing Zing and Cheetah illustrates how the performance of the Azul Zing JVM can benefit even solutions that have already eliminated garbage collection and have already been tuned and optimized. 

Kevin Houstoun, Chairman at Rapid Addition, said: “Azul Systems has demonstrated the strength of Zing though extensive testing and we believe this high-calibre product provides a perfectly complementary set of capabilities for organizations using RA-Cheetah. This venture will enable us to satisfy the requirements of current clients, in their desire to remain market-competitive, while illustrating to a wider audience the first-class results that are possible through the use of Rapid Addition’s solutions.”

Scott Sellers, Azul Systems CEO added: “Both latency and jitter are significant and expensive obstacles in today’s trading environments. The combination of Zing and RA-Cheetah offers a pioneering solution that will give clients better predictability, control, and performance. We look forward to a continued relationship with Rapid Addition as both our products, and client needs, develop over time.”