SpryWare founders Mike Kreutzjans and Daniel May are co-authors of the FAST™ protocol, which gives a good indication of SpryWare’s philosophy when it comes to forward thinking and developing more efficient systems.
The FAST protocol is the highly compact market data standard that radically reduces the bandwidth required to transmit ever-increasing real-time market data message rates. It was developed originally to address the spiraling market data volumes, especially the OPRA data. By leveraging field encoding, implicit tagging, and serialization FAST reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 90%.
Anyone who has dealt with a typical market data API or message format understands the problem with cumbersome proprietary API's and protocols. Most also understand the problems using general purpose compression algorithms with real-time market data, they introduce latency and are less efficient (in both CPU and compression ratios) than a special purpose algorithm. In a nutshell, FAST solves both these problems.
