Application Development

As part of West Highland’s evolution and as a natural extension of our offerings, West Highland provides application development services and custom enterprise applications written to leverage many of the top vendor provide APIs. West Highland has been engaged to work on a number of projects such as Intelligent Data Platform, Abstraction Layer technology and Market Data Cache.

Abstraction Layer Technology - the Data Lake Precursor

As the cost of market data continues to increase along with its demand, firms realize the need to break the dependency on a single vendor. Duplication of data and the subsequent redundant charges for multiple accesses to the same data set have driven the need to create a central repository that normalizes all data sets and delivers them to a common interface. West Highland has built abstraction layer technology to achieve this objective. The benefit is cost reduction, de-duplication of data sets and vendor independence.

READ MORE

Unique Qualifications

West Highland’s application development team is part of the Refinitiv developer program and a member of (LIST GROUPS WE BELONG TO). WHSS developers are versed in the following Market Data Vendor API’s:
 
Refinitiv – SSL/RFA/UPA
Bloomberg – BLAPI
ACTIV – ENTER HERE
ICE/IDC – ENTER HERE

TBase Programming Languages
C/C++/C#
Java
Perl
Python

Virtual Technologies
Docker

Open Source Technologies
Kafka
Cassandra
MySQL

Standard Database Technologies
SQL
Postgres

Big Data Techologies
ADD HERE


Feed Handlers

With the introduction of social media and growth in the “FinTech” sector, a lot of new data vendors have been surfacing. Every new data vendor is targeting the existing market data highway. In order to do that, the most common way of accessing the “highway” is through a feed handler.

Clients engage West Highland to create feed handlers for specific niche use cases of new market data vendors that have alternative data sets. The feed handlers allow the client to access and normalize data across existing market data distribution plants or adhere to internal custom API’s.

Market Data Cache

The Market Data Cache evolved from our Intelligent Data Platform project. This development allows West Highland to successfully handle the challenge of streaming realtime data.

Functionality

The Market Data Cache subscribes to real time data and stores each request from any vendor in cache, distribute it, and control who receives the data. The data requests are tracked, logged and reported on for relevant usage metrics. This information plays a key role in optimizing data usage and controlling costs. Providing this level of oversight gives market data administrators the ability to evaluate the real value of the data subscriptions, user or application usage patterns.

Intelligent Data Platform

When West Highland created its Market Data Framework, we established a precursor to a data lake. The Intelligent Data Platform (IDP) allows clients to cache and access all reference data from a single cache and immutable store. All clients have a myriad of referential data sources and queries into multiple security master files which are time consuming and extremely difficult to manage.

Much of the data that exists is redundant. As a result, clients end-up paying for data and licenses multiple times making the total cost of ownership exorbitant. The IDP allows the client to get the data they need, eliminate the redundancies, normalize the symbiology and store all of that information into perpetuity for future exercises.

Our Application Development platform is designed to support your infrastructure, we know what your end users are doing and we know what your application developers are doing.”

STEVEN R. ROE
CEO, West Highland