29West Latency Busters Messaging Breaks the Million Message Per Second Barrier; General Availability Announced.

WARRENVILLE, Ill. & CHICAGO -- Demonstrating 1.1 Million Messages Per Second between Two Low Cost Machines at the Futures Industry Association Expo 2004 in Chicago

E[acute accent]29West, Inc., a leading Chicago-based developer of high-performance messaging software solutions, today announced the general availability of release 1.0 of its Latency Busters(TM) Messaging (LBM) software at the Futures Industry Association Expo 2004 in Chicago. In an in-booth demo using a pair of $2,000 Dell Linux boxes on a Gigabit network, LBM is able to send over 1.1 million messages per second (25 byte messages). E[acute accent]"Increase the message size, and LBM can use over 80% of the Gigabit bandwidth," said Mark Mahowald, president at 29West. "We have leveraged our early access program to gain a good deal of external user testing and feedback over the past two months. After extensive testing at a number of evaluation accounts, as well as integration into production data feed applications by Wombat Financial Software, LBM release 1.0 proved itself ready for generally availability. Given the pressures many companies attending the FIA show are feeling with rapidly increasing message rates, we decided to offer a demonstration of how LBM could address their high speed messaging needs both now and in the future." E[acute accent]According to Mahowald, 29West has also set a new standard by providing support for well over 100,000 unique topics. This allows messaging users to control the traffic seen by small subscribers and prevents them from being swamped by the high message rates. E[acute accent]Wombat Financial Software has been working with LBM since May, successfully measuring its impact on high performance, low latency applications such as its direct exchange feed handlers. In a series of tests, when compared to the same application running over existing industry leading messaging products, LBM dramatically decreases CPU cycles used by the messaging layer and decreased system wide latency as well. E[acute accent]"The LBM software fits very well with our direct feed handler model. The performance has been nothing short of spectacular. Our experience with the LBM versions of our products shows that we have easily broken our own market-leading records of low latency and throughput using real world market data, previously set using other messaging solutions. With LBM, we're offering the market an integrated product that sets a new standard in performance." said Ron Verstappen, president and CEO at Wombat (www.wombatfs.com). E[acute accent]29West offers LBM as a standalone product for use with application vendors or large end users who need high performance messaging solutions. 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 need higher performance than they can achieve with the current solutions in the market today.

E[acute accent]About 29West

E[acute accent]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.