Eurex Technology Roadmap

The improvements in the Eurex Technology Roadmap (PDF) address major trends observed in electronic derivatives trading. New trading strategies such as algorithmic trading and new products result in a significant growth in daily quotes and order volume and create an increasing demand for higher order book depth and additional market information. With its Technology Roadmap, Eurex preempts new requirements by constantly tuning its systems to accelerate trading speed and throughput, upgrading system capacity, enhancing real-time information distribution and improving interfaces and risk management.

Initiated in the first quarter of 2006, the Eurex Technology Roadmap covers several areas for improvement: software and hardware upgrades, launch of new services, distribution of new and differentiated market data packages.

In December 2006, Eurex upgraded its network and introduced new system hardware. The bandwidth was upgraded to 1 Mbps and Eurex was the first exchange to upgrade to the next generation processors, the so-called Itanium technology. In combination with various software enhancements, these measures have already significantly improved the system's performance: the average roundtrip time of orders and quotes has been lowered by two-third for the whole network.

The next major step in the implementation of the technology roadmap is the introduction of two new optional interfaces:

Enhanced Broadcast Solution

Eurex will disseminate market information to members through an innovative high performance, socket-based broadcast interface known as Enhanced Broadcast Solution.

The new interface will be a low latency solution with a highly granular subscription model and will closely resemble the FIX 5.0 (Financial Information eXchange) protocol.

Eurex members will be able to effectively use this new interface to develop applications that fit their individual requirements.

This interface features market depth information for options, among other products. more

Enhanced Transaction Solution

The first half of 2008 will see the introduction of another optional interface known as Eurex Enhanced Transaction Solution, which will be totally geared to latency-minimized entry and management of trading-related system entries.

Thanks to a "low-footprint" solution, it will also facilitate connectivity of all participants, independent of the infrastructure they use.

In this way, Eurex will respond to participants' requests for customizable connectivity options and mainly targets the automated trading community. more