West Highland Tends to Orchid's US Growth

New York-based systems monitoring and support provider West Highland Support Services has partnered with Tokyo-based data technology vendor Orchid Technology to sell and support its Jigsaw Platform market data display application in the US.

Until now, Orchid has provided its data technologies to investment banks and asset managers in Japan, but signed an agreement with West Highland in August to act as the exclusive reseller of Jigsaw in the US to help it expand into a region where it had no existing market presence, says Orchid owner Serge Kimura.

"We do not have much experience with US-based clients, but I would imagine similar types of firms would be interested in Jigsaw, either as a replacement for their current front-end solution or as a new product distributed under their own brand," Kimura says, adding that the platform's customizable user interface enables firms to white-label the display application.

Jigsaw is a vendor-neutral market data display application that can be used to display proprietary and third-party vendor data - including full-depth-of-market quote data, indexes, news and charts, as well as fundamental data - which it sources via pre-built adapters to Thomson Reuters' RMDS, Tibco Rendezvous, local Japanese data vendors such as Jiji Press and Stockweather, and datafeeds from Morningstar's Real-Time division. Orchid is also developing a new adapter to integrate data from Interactive Data's PlusFeed consolidated datafeed, which it aims to release by the end of 2010.

Jigsaw's data display features are independent of the underlying data delivery architecture, so data display terminals can provide a consistent user experience when viewing multiple sources of market data, even when those data sources change.

This means that the software's target clients include any firm that has multiple sources of data - including broker datafeeds, third-party vendor feeds and proprietary pricing data or research - to display via a single desktop application, says Ted Sutton, vice president of business development at West Highland.

In order to support new sales in the US, West Highland will provide pre-sales support, product demonstrations and proof-of-concept installations of the Jigsaw technology, and once it has secured new clients for the product, it will also act as the primary support contact for those clients, offering installation, configuration, training and ongoing first-level support.

"Because Orchid is based in Japan, it is difficult for us to provide support to clients in the US in a timely fashion, and this is where engaging West Highland's services can be very valuable to us and those clients," Kimura says.

Sutton says most client support will center around training on the functions available in Jigsaw, though some may also involve assisting users converting from other display applications by configuring Jigsaw so that it provides a similar look and feel to the legacy product.

West Highland is currently training its support engineers to familiarize them with all aspects of the Jigsaw software, and preparing sales and marketing collateral to present to potential clients, Sutton says. "West Highland has primarily been focused on infrastructure and the back end, and this agreement is expanding on our skills, extending to the desktop and front end, and creating a broader offering from us," he adds.