29West Announces Early Access Program for Next-Generation High-Performance Messaging Transport; Wombat Financial Software Sees Impressive Performance in Live Testing.

WARRENVILLE, Ill. -- 29West, Inc. today announced an early access program for customers and prospects interested in working with the 29West Latency Busters(TM) Messaging (LBM) layer.

According to Mark Mahowald, president at 29West, a leading Chicago-based developer of high-performance messaging software solutions, 29West has signed two commercial licenses and has six companies actively working with the early access code. "Since we have been getting such positive feedback from the pilot evaluations as well as early customers, we decided to formalize the early access program and invite additional interested companies to participate."

Under the 29West early access program, companies that sign a non-disclosure agreement gain access to the full documentation, including header files and design documents, and receive Windows and Linux LBM binaries and sample applications, which allows them to run real-world performance tests and understand what would be required to leverage LBM as the next-generation messaging platform for their applications.

On commodity-class PC hardware, 29West early access accounts are seeing performance numbers that exceed 450,000 messages per second on a 100 Mbps LAN and have been able to establish over 100,000 unique topics.

"We have been very pleased with the early access code's performance, and it's nice to know that as we've not yet focused on tuning, there's still room for improvement," said Todd Montgomery, principal software architect at 29West.

With a planned early November 2004 general availability release and extensive integration testing currently underway in Warrenville, Illinois by 29West and in Belfast, Northern Ireland by Wombat Financial Software, it was important to offer the code to a wider audience.

"We've gained valuable customer feedback on the code and wanted to give a broader group of accounts the opportunity to begin hands-on evaluations," said Mahowald. "By working closely with prospects to understand their key requirements, and allowing them to measure performance in their own environments, we ensure that we're building what the market needs, and our customers gain experience and comfort with the software."

Wombat will be offering LBM as an integrated part of its broader market-data solutions. LBM uses a server-less architecture that fits Wombat's goal for high performance and flexibility.

"This architecture not only makes the solution exceedingly fast and simple to use, it eliminates the need for extra copies of the data, bringing significant increases in throughput and makes the overall solution very CPU-efficient. In our integration testing with live data feeds at pilot accounts, performance improvements over existing messaging solutions have been sizeable. We're rather excited about providing the market with a fully integrated solution before the end of 2004 that sets a new standard in performance." said Ron Verstappen, president and CEO at Wombat.

29West offers LBM as a standalone product for use with application vendors or large end users. It also provides an OEM licensing model to allow companies to embed LBM inside a broader market solution. By offering source code if needed and a willingness to provide extensions and customization as desired, 29West's strategy is to meet the needs of a growing array of sophisticated large users who cannot gain what they need from existing solutions.

According to Mahowald, "The existing high speed solutions in the market perform well and have met the markets needs for many years. Many of these systems date back to the mid 1980s and they have aged well. With the explosion in data rates and the need to support a wide range of networks and devices, many end users are convinced a new messaging architecture is required to meet their needs going forward. We offer not only a next-generation architecture, with design ideas that build on real world experience, but a next-generation business model with pricing and support designed to work with our customers, not take advantage of them. Before the 29West Latency Busters Messaging, users were being forced to develop their own solution. We can deliver a better option."

About 29West

Founded in 2002 by a former Talarian executive, 29West team members have been at the forefront of high speed, real-time data distribution and networking since the mid-1980s. They created the original architecture and led the implementation of the first Rich/Reuters TRIARCH digital trading floors. They also crafted the TCP/IP stack that was shipped with many major OEM UNIX implementations, including SVr4 from AT&T USL. Additionally, 29West engineers were responsible for the first commercial implementations of Cisco's PGM reliable multicast protocol, as well as the commercialization and support of the Lucent-designed RMTP II reliable multicasting protocol. For more information, visit www.29west.com.

About Wombat

Wombat Financial Software is the leading producer of next-generation market data infrastructure. US-based with a rapidly expanding Belfast, Northern Ireland development center, Wombat's distributed architecture underpins automated market-making systems, electronic-trading floors and tick-capture platforms around the world, exploiting direct-data feeds with volumes exceeding 300 million records per day. Wombat's product suite currently includes: feed handlers for direct-exchange and aggregated feeds; ticker plants delivering data with less than 3 millisecond latency; ultra high-performance market data APIs; middleware components; virtual order books and option chains; tick-capture adapters; and signal servers. For more information, visit www.wombatfs.com.