By Advanced Trading Contributing Writer Daniel Safarik

Linedata Services' LongView order management system will soon include technology to synchronize its blotter with those of EMSs. The first co-development agreement was struck with Goldman Sachs’ REDIPlus unit, which about 30% of Linedata’s client base also uses, according to Gavin Little-Gill, senior vice president of product management, Linedata. Customers of both platforms will no longer need to manually transfer or upload data between their LongView and REDIPlus blotters, and can rest assured that any change affecting the order in one platform will automatically appear in the other.

“The beauty of this is that an order can reside in two places, simultaneously -- and they are synchronized,” notes Little-Gill. “This is like moving from a single instrument to an orchestra. You could have LiquidNet reading your OMS blotter and picking off shares there while you are also working an order in REDI.”
This means a trader can initiate an order in one platform, which may have access to certain markets, and split the order to run through platforms that may access other markets not available in the first platform, with the confidence that no double entries are occurring.

REDIPlus is only the first of many future platforms Linedata hopes to synchronize. Seeking partnerships was a strategic choice for Linedata, Little-Gill says. Linedata chose the approach of integrating with popular individual EMS platforms one-by-one, rather than purchasing an EMS and integrating it with LongView trading, or attempting to “bolt on” EMS-like functions onto LongView and competing with other EMS platforms already on its clients’ desktops.

“We see our clients using multiple EMSs, and they should be able to choose whomever they want on the brokerage side,” says Little-Gill. “Each has its own niches and threads. We are just looking at enabling them.”

The real-time link is accomplished by initiating a separate FIX session alongside the main session linking the two platforms, using a pared-down set of FIX tags that correspond only to fields shared by the two platforms, says Gregg Drumma, vice president of STP product and development at Linedata. This option was chosen over other, bleeding-edge technologies that may have had the potential to create more problems than they solved.
“We had considered Web services and publication querying,” Drumma says. “But there are portal and security issues with Web services. What do people have today that they really understand? FIX. We are publishing small snapshots of the blotter, rather than putting anything into memory, and publishing updates.”

Although the holy grail may be an integrated all-in-one EMS/OMS offering, the incremental approach to solving the issue of "the swiveling chair problem" [traders constantly toggling between a proliferating number of screens viewing EMSs, DMA systems and OMSs] yields small, repeatable victories. Although some LongView clients may have to wait some time before all of their EMSs are synched the same way, says TABB Group analyst Adam Sussman.
“This is a less-ambitious short-term solution,” Sussman says. “I think [Linedata] have simplified the solution to maximize their chance of success. Even if you build the perfect front-end trading platform, you still need to trade with multiple brokers. If it is totally broker-neutral and no one is charging commission and you get all your research chits…I could see [an all-in-one application] happening. But there is some functionality within these different EMS platforms that may be useful. Both are good, valid attempts at solving the problem.”

Linedata’s chosen independence from broker control and from the task of attempting to build a super-application probably allows it to focus more closely on matters it can control, which would hold some appeal for buy-siders, who want connectivity to be “like a light switch you turn on and off,” says Rob Hegarty, managing director of securities and investments at TowerGroup. “They don’t really care how the integration happens.”
Linedata currently has about 150 clients, including about 25 percent of the 40 largest asset managers worldwide.

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