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Metamako, the leading specialist in network devices for financial services and telecommunications, today announced the launch of MetaWatch. It’s unique in the way it combines diverse functionality in a single software app for Metamako’s MetaMux and MetaApp devices (announced in November 2014 and June 2015 respectively), and dramatically simplifies network monitoring and analysis.
The timestamping accuracy requirements for MiFID II have been causing consternation for many firms in the financial markets, as they struggle to implement a solution which will satisfy the regulators. MetaWatch provides a key component that is required for MiFID II compliance trade reporting, where each participant in a trade, both on the sell- and buy-sides, will be required to timestamp every 'reportable event' in the lifecycle of a transaction.
Dr. Dave Snowdon, founder and co-CTO of Metamako, said: “We’ve really lowered the complexity barrier, and allowed users to monitor every network link with virtually no impact. Network monitoring for MiFID II compliance was a difficult problem to solve. Existing solutions are expensive, error-prone and inelegant, requiring complex and unreliable cabling and occupying a lot of data centre space. In the past, users have avoided network monitoring for these reasons, but regulation such as MiFID II means that this is no longer an option.”
MetaWatch brings a completely different approach to data capture and network monitoring, significantly improving the reliability of both activities, while reducing complexity and costs. MetaWatch does this by a clever combination of multiple components: tapping, aggregation, buffering, timestamping and synchronisation. It provides highly accurate timestamps using industry-standard formats, as well as a large data buffer, which guarantees capture of all the data, even during market bursts, which is when data usually gets lost. MetaWatch gives clients absolute confidence that they are capturing and timestamping all the data on the network for meeting their compliance and regulatory commitments as well as for back-testing.
Clients can simply install MetaWatch on their existing devices with a software update; future upgrades can be downloaded onto the devices. MetaWatch is the second application that Metamako has released for their FPGA-based devices, underlining the overall flexibility of the platforms.
“When we designed the MetaApp and MetaMux devices we built an architecture that had capabilities far beyond what our clients required at the time because we wanted to make sure that there was plenty of room for much more sophisticated functionality. The launch of MetaWatch is part of our strategy of innovation, not just with hardware but also with software apps. MetaWatch is the next step in our commitment to simplifying networks, reducing latency and increasing flexibility,” says Snowdon.
The beta version of MetaWatch has now been released to all existing customers, while the production version will be available as a software update in January 2016.
