January update

2015 has well and truly kicked off and we are looking forward to an exciting year ahead!

Over the month of January we’ve been very busy extending the architecture and data model of XMon to support Bloomberg terminals and real-time/delayed market subscriptions at the user level. With this, we are now able to provide our clients with full visibility over market subscriptions costs and in addition to reporting capabilities such as streaming data costs per user, per team and per business line over any period of time.

We’ve also now set up agreements with Thomson Reuters and developments to support the TR static data feed – Data Scope Select – are scheduled to start in the coming weeks.

All in all, an eventful January we’d like to think! As always, we love to hear your feedback and discuss data costs and analytics, so do reach out… We’d love to chat!

Amjad

Festive Update

A month ago we released XMon 1.0 and since then, we’ve been releasing features and updates on a weekly basis. We rolled out five updates since our last newsletter which have all been pushed in a way that is seamless to our users. The updates include improvements to user experience, reporting and administration.

We’ve now also engaged discussions with an additional major data vendor to pave the way for a partnership agreement and inclusion of wider market data business intelligence within XMon. Stay tuned for updates on this end early 2015!

We love to listen to user feedback and our developments are driven by user input, so do reach out if you’d like to discuss any aspect of XMon or to talk about your requirements around market data monitoring and cost management.

Finally, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful festive season and a very Happy New Year 2015!

XMon 1.0 is now GA!

We just released XMon 1.0!

 

After months of hard work, coding and testing, we’re delighted to release version 1.0 GA of XMon!

The goal of XMon is to help our clients increase their understanding of market data costs and improve their control over market data spending.

In this first release, we focus on providing a product that is fully compatible with Bloomberg’s Data License offering. XMon 1.0 provides complete visibility and control over static data downloads and provides global and historical cost reporting capabilities across the firm.

With our recently introduced data contract model, XMon is able to incorporate static and recurring costs, on top of the variable costs associated with intra-day requests. This feature adds a new dimension to the product, paving the way for a more comprehensive coverage of the costs associated with market data.

We love to hear client feedback, so please do reach out, whether it’s for analysing of data bills, controlling your data spending, allocating your data costs or validating vendor SLAs, we’d be delighted to help!

We hope you enjoy this release!

Features in this release

  • Real time data download dashboard: see data requests as they occur
  • Full control over data downloads, per system, per environment: limit cost of test / dev environments
  • Data contract modelling: include recurring costs
  • Time series global cost and volume reporting: understand global market data spending

 

Click here to go to our product information page.

XMon 0.5 Beta Released

We just released XMon 0.5 Beta!

 

This release further enhances the monitoring capabilities of the system by adding new adapters and improving the granularity of the data model for improved reporting and cost allocation.

In this version, we’ve introduced the Bloomberg WebAPI adapter which completes the suite of adapters for Bloomberg’s Data License offering. We now fully support FTP, SFTP and WebAPI adapters for Data License. As will all other XMon adapters, the link with WebAPI is seamless does not involve any client-side software installation.

In 0.5 we’ve also improved the data model of XMon and introduced the concept of a ‘Data Contract’. A Data Contract is a summary of your agreement with your data vendor. It contains any SLA agreements, expiry dates and special pricing arrangements, and is the convergence point of Data Sources in XMon. With contract definitions in place, we can now handle multiple agreements and monitor for SLA breaches at the data level.

As we get closer to our scheduled launch in November, we’d love to hear your feedback on current features or ideas for future releases so do get in touch!

 

Features in this release

  • New Bloomberg DL WebAPI connector
  • New ‘Data Contract’ model
  • Minor dashboard update for rules visualisation

 

XMon 0.4 Beta

Over the weekend, we released XMon 0.4 Beta. This update integrates our new reporting engine, powered by the Pentaho Business Intelligence suite.

XMon users can now generate on-demand enterprise-wide cost allocation reports, rejected message reports and export all market data requests made over any time period. The reporting engine supports PDF, Excel and CSV exports and the reports can be configured and generated directly from the XMon interface. We will be adding new standard report types and are working on templates to help our clients reconcile Data Vendor bills. In addition to new templates, the next releases will include a scheduler to automate and distribute the generated reports.

We’ve also been working on the documentation and updated the UI with an interactive Q&A section accessible through the ‘HELP’ menu.

Finally, this version includes several behind-the-scenes improvements to performance, pricing precision and user rights and permissions. As always, we love to hear your thoughts and comments so please do reach out!

XPansion XMon 0.1 Beta is out

We’ve just released XPansion XMon Beta!

XPansion XMon is the first module of our Business Monitoring suite and allows financial institutions to monitor and control, in real-time, static market data flows which originate from their internal systems. By using XMon, clients obtain a real-time view of data flows and their costs, and if required, clients can define rules to limit or control the costs associated with single data requests, data vendors or internal systems. XMon provides clients with the ability to run time series global reports that provide a real-time view of static data costs and flows across the firm.

XMon acts as the ‘man-in-the-middle’ sitting between internal systems and external data vendors and intercepting each request and applying pricing functions and rules to those requests. XMon is able to filter erroneous or unintended requests caused by human or system error and that traditionally cause unexpected peaks in data costs.

XPansion XMon provides the following features:

Consolidated real-time view of all static data downloads

Monitor in real-time all static data downloads from internal systems to external data vendors. XMon intelligently identifies the type of security and estimated cost of the request based on the data vendor’s specifications.

Real-time static data cost control

Implement cost filters and maximum budgets for total control over static data costs. Soft limits can also be implemented so that a manual email approval workflow is required for the data request to be accepted.

Flexible and customizable rule engine

Define hard and soft limits per internal system for cost control, security type and data category.

Time series reporting

Real-time time series reporting across the firm helps identify cost peaks, data cost trends and data traffic throughput for internal systems.

Multi-user capable

Set up users with different profiles and rights all with secure access to the on-line web client.

Multi-system capable

Manage multiple internal and external systems, with customized rules and quotas.