The New York Stock Exchange has made one of its main application programming interfaces open source, in a move that it said would support development and ease product integration in the financial services market.
NYSE Technologies has open sourced its Middleware Agnostic Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAMA). Now called OpenMAMA, the vendor neutral platform "will enable companies to protect their technology investments and help remove the friction in implementing new trading technology solutions by using a consistent API", said NYSE.
Hosted by The Linux Foundation, OpenMAMA is supported by a steering committee that includes JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, EMC, Exegy and Fixnetix, among others.
NYSE said the open-source code would establish a new industry standard to deliver greater flexibility and reduced development times, with the underlying goal of lowering costs and "building broader support for a range of interconnected programs".
Stanley Young, chief executive at NYSE Technologies, said: "Through the industry steering committee we are positioning ourselves alongside our peers and customers to become expert consultants for open sourced capital markets technology. With OpenMAMA, customers and firms everywhere will benefit from third-party contributors creating a richer and more compelling API."
The first release of OpenMAMA is already available, with "substantial updates" expected through to March 2012, said NYSE.
In other recent NYSE news, last month an electrical fire at a NYSE data centre affected communications connectivity to 58 trading firms. The electrical fire was in a single computer cabinet at the Mahwah data centre in New Jersey.