Stefan Ott is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Confinity Solutions. Stefan’s career spans Deutsche Boerse, Reuters and IBM. At Deutsche Boerse, Stefan was Head of Marketing Information Systems, at Reuters (now Refinitiv) Global Head of Common Platform for Content Management, and at IBM he had a role of worldwide sales and business development for financial markets.
Stefan is the founder and Chief Executive of Confinity Solutions, a provider of high-performance low latency solutions at scale demands to the market data, real time trading, valuation and analytics markets.
The Confinity Solutions story begins with IBM's acquisition of InfoDyne Corporation in 2008, a privately held US software firm specialising in high-speed data integration and delivery for trading platforms.
InfoDyne provided software that is designed to enable trading firms to process large volumes of data at microsecond response rates. InfoDyne's market data delivery platform took data from hundreds of sources and delivered it in a standardised format, helping customers to control escalating data feed costs. InfoDyne became part of IBM's WebSphere product line.
Stefan joined IBM Germany in 2010. In IBM software group Stefan had responsibility for Websphere Front Office (former InfoDyne market data system) MQ LLM (low latency messaging) products and the financial markets framework offerings. Given his background at Reuters and Deutsche Boerse, Stefan was an excellent fit to the Financial Markets & Banking industry solutions team and the integration of WebSphere MQ LLM technology with InfoDyne assets. This was IBM's first serious move into the low-latency space.
In 2015 Stefan approached IBM regarding the acquisition of the IBM MQ low latency assets. It took 18 months to settle the deal which was finally sealed in 2016. Although the IBM products were extremely efficient and high performant - underpinned by 16 patents - they had not had significant updates for several years.
Confinity Solutions' first task was product familiarisation then to take the products to the next level. In 2017 IBM put in place an agreement to resell Confinity Solutions’ Low Latency Messaging software (CLLM), that is optimized for the high-volume, low-latency requirements of financial market firms and other industries (telecommunications, manufacturing, aerospace, and defence).
Confinity LLM is the successor product to the IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging product. At the same time, IBM announced its withdrawal from marketing and end of support for their own IBM WebSphere MQ LLM offering. The CLLM product is available on Windows and Linux platforms, and unlike the replaced IBM offering, does not require a separate licence for the message store component.
Confinity Low Latency Messaging (CLLM) plays to its strengths in environments requiring extreme low-latency and high message volumes and extremely high quality of service. The Confinity Solutions’ building blocks are ideal for this new world of exchanges which are multi asset, multi model (call auction, agency trading networks, and alternate auction models), all dependent on flexible, robust technology. The CLLM tool kit is deployed within the Deutsche Boerse T7 trading system and is deployed at other exchanges including Moscow Exchange and the Chilean Stock Exchange. Elsewhere in the capital markets Confinity Solutions’ products are deployed at institutions, such as IG Markets, Daiwa or Chi-X Asia.
With Confinity Solutions, customers can gain greater levels of performance and flexibility helping them reduce time to market, offering Integrability with other third-party components, enabling a reduction of the total cost of ownership with a proven technology. Last year Confinity Solutions hosted its first LLM user group conference when Stefan presented the product roadmap: “We are excited about the new opportunities and the future we can give to CLLM in working with our customers”. Engaging the users in improving the products underpins the new way forward for Low Latency Messaging at Confinity Solutions.
Over the last decade the markets for low latency trading and market data distribution have dramatically increased such that most equities and derivatives trading (and increasingly all assets) are on some form of low latency infrastructure, but the support organizations have not kept up, remaining highly localized or fragmented. Confinity Solutions has partnered with Persistent Systems which has a strong development infrastructure in Pune, India, and a global footprint. Through this partnership Confinity Solutions can be an innovator in the low latency high performance market data, analytics and trading systems space, offering high quality technical support.
On Confinity Solutions' roadmap is moving to FPGA based hardware platforms either in a traditional data centre environment or on a cloud environment supporting the performance requirements of low-latency/high-frequency trading. The emerging world of AI focused custom hardware architectures (including the tried and proven FPGA environments) provide Confinity Solutions with a whole new set of environments to extend its already proven high predominance low latency toolkit.
Confinity Solutions' clients may have different business challenges, but one thing they have in common: is the need to process and get more value out of enormous amounts of data in a challenging ultra-low latency environment. With Confinity Solutions’ products customers can build high-performance solutions at a reduced total cost of ownership with world class support.