West Highland Support Services (WHSS) offers clients the ability to outsource the entire market data management function. Engineering, infrastructure, operations, administration and support are included in this premier service. Clients choose to have WHSS provide the infrastructure in either a hosted or on premise solution. This offering also supports existing infrastructure owned by the client. WHSS provides flexible support models customized to each client specific need.
West Highland is a vendor agnostic managed services provider that has a specific solution to monitoring the suite of servers, services and applications that Bloomberg provides to its client base. Our solution provides detailed visibility to a system that is historically closed to client monitoring.
West Highland provides cost effective 24-hour Managed Services for Bloomberg products provided to clients. We provide a proactive service that leverages industry leading Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools which we have customized to support all aspects of the product suite that clients rely on. This includes the monitoring, alerting, supporting, and reporting of:
• Circuit availability and capacity
• Network and Routers availability and capacity
• Performance and capacity of Bloomberg appliance’s
• API Monitoring
• 2,500+ triggers for monitoring and alerting of appliance health & availability
• Latency monitoring to benchmark data delivery ensuring consistency
• Service Advisory communication on potential content or delivery impact
Monitoring market data platforms is critical but more important is the engineering support to manage any issues identified through closure.
Our managed service provides the following benefits:
• Support desks with 100+ years of market data engineering experience
• Mitigates risk of attrition, right-sizing, vacation coverage, and re-training costs
• Full ownership of all issues acting as the single point of contact collaborating with the client and vendor(s) till the issue is resolved
• Diverse industry experience promotes sharing best practices across our other clients and the industry
• Complete suite of monitoring tools and direct client access to the same tools / dashboards that West Highland uses
Our in-depth knowledge allows us to look across all aspects of the platform to make sure our clients have consistent and reliable delivery of content to their business.
WHSS provides a detailed level of visibility into market data empowering our clients to make strategic decisions that drive their business. Our offerings provide a level of detail that ensure our clients are not at a competitive disadvantage to others.
MONITORING OPTIONS
Remote Assist
Clients that need a minimal level of support benefit from the Remote Assist option. This is designed for clients that want to leverage WHSS’s subject matter expertise on a limited or as-needed basis. It is driven by either client initiation or by WHSS’ automated monitoring tools. The service can be any combination of remote hours, passive/on-call hours.
Remote Protect
Premier service designed to remotely manage and support market data delivery systems. This offering includes architecture design, installation, upgrades, remote support, administration, and WHSS’s suite of monitoring tools.
Managed Care
A turn-key solution including hardware, architecture design, installation, upgrades, support, administration, and WHSS’s suite of monitoring tools.
A significant portion of a firm’s market data costs come from hardware, connectivity, and data center charges. WHSS hosting services provide clients additional choices for controlling costs and right-sizing their market data delivery systems. We provide IaaS, manage private hosted cloud environments already in place, collocation deployments with client equipment in a WHSS partner cloud data center or, in a WHSS cloud facility, and infrastructure on client premise.
Middleware vendors such as Solace have platforms which are deployed and customized to meet their client’s business needs. In the Financial Service Industry, clients leverage Solace to solve different use cases.
• Low latency delivery of market data from a vendor source to business applications
• Guaranteed delivery of pricing and trade data through the trade life cycle from discovery, execution, risk to clearing
• Connectivity for multi-region risk management support
West Highland provides cost effective vendor agnostic 24-hour Managed Services for Solace platforms. We leverage industry leading Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools which we have customized and enhanced to support all aspects of Solace products. This includes the monitoring, alerting, supporting and reporting of:
• 35,000+ triggers from power supply availability to appliance availability
• Network and Router availability and capacity
• Customizable message and alert aggregation to reduce the number of alerts delivered to the client reducing unnecessary noise
• Latency monitoring of queues to benchmark data delivery ensuring consistency
• Service Advisory communication on potential content or delivery impact
Monitoring client’s platforms is critical but more important is the engineering support to manage any issues identified to closure. Our managed service provides the following benefits:
• Support desks with 100+ years of market data engineering experience
• Support team are fully certified as Solace Solution Consultants
• Mitigates risk of attrition, right-sizing, vacation coverage, and re-training costs
• Full ownership of all issues acting as the single point of contact collaborating with the client and vendor(s) till the issue is resolved
• Diverse industry experience promotes sharing best practices across our other clients and the industry
• Complete suite of monitoring tools and direct client access to the same tools / dashboards that West Highland uses
• Support includes both the vendor service and solace platform to identify issues quickly and reducing the MTTR.
• Solace appliance and software upgrades
• Complete suite of monitoring tools and direct client access to the same tools / dashboards that West Highland uses
Our in-depth knowledge allows us to look across all aspects of the platform to make sure our clients have consistent and reliable delivery of content to their business.
WHSS provides market data Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to our clients This offering eliminates the recurring burden of capital expenditures as well as managing increasing or decreasing needs. This unique solution guarantees the performance and sustainability of the infrastructure – if the environment does not perform as designed, a new platform is deployed at no additional cost.
Cloud Capacity
The system is architected and properly benchmarked so that if your business changes and grows, so will your infrastructure. WHSS has the ability to quickly address your needs – up or down – without impacting your business.
WHSS provides an outsourced service for the administration and management of the Refinitiv DACS and Bloomberg EMRS entitlement systems. This service is available 24 hours a day to accommodate client enterprise needs and eliminates the burden of a commoditized function.
Elimination of recurring capital expenditures
Reports on cost reduction opportunities
Proper utilization of internal IT staff allowing for focus on key business objectives
Consistent process for end to end management of Market Data
Reporting on necessary entitlement compliance
Assistance with exchange audits defending validity of data
Monthly reporting on trends, incidents, and recommendations
Proactive analysis of system health and application performance
Integration with 3rd party vendors for permission related issues
Guarantees the firm’s interests are the primary consideration
Dynamically managing capacity requirements
Software revision management
Expert Engineering team with specific industry knowledge
Our toolsets and visualizations allow us to be on top of problems before they occur, and establish trending and patterns along the likes of tools that are used in AI and different data collection techniques, so that we can predict when certain things are going to fail.”
STEVEN R. ROE
CEO, West Highland Support Services
