IBM Snares InfoDyne in Financial Transactions Push

IBM beefed up its financial transactions portfolio with today’s announcement
that it’s purchased privately-held InfoDyne. Terms of the deal were not
disclosed. Park Ridge, Illinois-based InfoDyne will now be part of IBM’s
WebSphere division with its 14 employees, including founder and CEO Guy
Tagliavia, reporting to Tom Rosamilia, general manager of WebSphere.

InfoDyne provides high-speed software platforms and connectors designed
to provide faster data delivery in the highly competitive and time-sensitive
world of stock trading. IBM (NYSE:IBM) said the acquisition supports its
strategy of offering a comprehensive portfolio of industry-focused software
for real-time needs.

A recent example, was IBM’s January purchase of AptSoft, which offers
software used to identify and alert businesses to emerging trends and
events. Aptsoft uses information culled from real-time queries of data
stored on all of a company’s disparate software applications.

With InfoDyne in tow, IBM said it will be better able to offer solutions
for electronic trading, an industry that’s seen exponential growth in
transactions and data volumes the past several years.

Today, an estimated
four billion shares per day trade on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and
regional exchanges, according to the TABB Group, which estimates the figures
are six times the volume on those same exchanges five years ago.

“InfoDyne’s software enables microseconds’ response for highly
competitive trading firms,” said IBM’s Rosamilia, in a conference call
announcing the deal. “This is a big play for us in the low latency field.”

InfoDyne is a bit more bullish on its performance. A statement on the
company’s Website said the firm is “committed to maintaining system
performance, including sub-millisecond latency, despite an ever-increasing
volume of data.”

Among the ways InfoDyne said it achieves such high performance is its
efficiency in software design and leveraging of multi-threaded
multi-processor environments. The company also said it uses a modular
architecture that allows it to increase data capacity by adding additional
hardware, network and software components.

Asked to name InfoDyne’s competitors, Tagliavia hedged a bit, while
Rosamilia named Tibco.
But he said in a lot of cases, large trading companies have developed
solutions in house.

“We believe we can do it for less money than they can” in house,
Rosamilia said. “This is plumbing, this is what we do well.” He said
companies that start off trying to develop faster ways to data acquisition
end up writing their own middleware and that IBM’s solutions, such as a
combination of InfoDyne and Websphere, IBM’s middleware, would be more
cost-effective.

Analyst Charles King said the addition of InfoDyne gives IBM another
weapon in its competition with Sun and HP for financial customers. “These
kind of businesses buy servers by the gross,” King, analyst with Pund-IT,
told InternetNews.com. “So having this kind of edge can make a really
big difference.

“Also, the fact that InfoDyne will integrate with WebSphere is a major
differentiator even though WebSphere connects to many different systems. To
have it really tightly integrated can be a real value proposition in the
financial services space.”

IBM said InfoDyne is the 69th acquisition it’s made since the beginning of 2003.

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