Orc Software Readies Canned Strategies

The new offering is targeted at customers who "might not be IT savvy" or "know the strategies they want, but can't put them into code," says Martin Koopman, president of the North American division of Orc.

Clients can use the strategies in two ways, says Koopman. Customers can use the code as a building foundation and write custom code of top of it or they can use the strategies right out of the box, explains Koopman. Orc staff will work with those clients who wish to augment the code, he adds.

The solution is not designed to provide order execution strategies, says George Wishart, sales director at Orc. It is meant to provide out-of-the-box proprietary, event-driven strategies, such as market-making strategies for options markets or for arbitrage strategies between two markets, Wishart says. "We are not moving into the order execution space," he adds.

Orc plans to expand its offering to add three or four more strategies early in the first quarter of next year.

The vendor's internal staff has been developing the framework for the past three months and has been collecting internal knowledge for the last 12 months, says Koopman.

Orc is also working on an enhancement to its connectivity offering and FIX protocol platform CameronFIX, says Wishart. A combination of software upgrades and consulting services, CameronFIX Accelerator is mean to reduce latency in the FIX engine by 80 percent, he claims.

The messaging accelerator will be available for existing CameronFIX customers. Clients will receive a software upgrade, which involves a new message object that reduces garbage collection in JavaScript and was written by CameronFIX creator John Cameron, according to Wishart.

In addition, Cameron will also evaluate how each client uses CameronFIX and the FIX protocol to weed out any inefficiencies and offer suggestions on how to reduce latency even further, says Wishart. The current transit time through CameronFIX is under a millisecond, he adds.

The offering, which was introduced within the last two months, is currently being run by a few of Orc's customers, says Wishart. A full rollout is scheduled for early in the first quarter of 2008, he adds.

A New York-headquartered client is "seeing close to 80 percent latency reduction," claims Wishart.