We had a diverse networking team. I'm not sure what other solutions were being used offshore in the Asia-Pacific region or the European region. But I'm not aware of our using anything before Corvil. We used to have some sniffers and things like that placed at random points in the network, but nothing apart from that.

We brought in Corvil because we are one of the few dark pools remaining in the US, one of the largest dark pools, and we wanted to be competitive for all our clients who are connecting to us. We wanted to improve on the latencies being seen on the network from the client's perspective.

We used two different solutions prior to getting Corvil. There was a company called Seanet. I don't even know if they're still around anymore. They were a good company. They were great with data. But then, along came this sexy, new system called Correlix which beat out Seanet in our company back then. We ran them for a little while and we found that, while they looked great, what was under the covers wasn't as great. Then we went to Corvil.

We just researched other options to the Correlix application and my project manager, back then, set up a meeting with Corvil to pitch their wares to us.

One of the things that stood out about Corvil was that it had fewer machines, first of all; it handled data better. The data was more accurate. With the previous solution we had, it looked great. It had a fancy front end, but if you wanted to "carry on a conversation with it," it really wasn't there. The keys were the data and information that we were able to get out of Corvil at the time. Granted, Corvil was much more expensive than Correlix because Correlix was free. Correlix gave it away because they wanted your data. That was their model. But their product just didn't hold up.

We didn't have a previous solution. We were running custom scripts and parsing logs before Corvil. We had some latency-analysis tools but they were all things built in-house.

When I joined the company two years ago, the Corvil PoC was going on, so the decision to move to something better was made before my time here. The way they were doing it before Corvil wasn't very scalable. It needed to be centralized. Each team was doing things their own way. It wasn't very joined up. You ended up with a lot of duplication or slightly different ways of doing it. These guys have got other things to be getting on with, rather than doing the analysis. That was the big gap. We had multiple teams using FIX, for example, and one person might build something that showed some kind of metric, how many market-data snapshots we get in X period. Some other team might build exactly the same thing, but in a slightly different way. So we just ended up with this myriad of tools and there was no compatibility between them and there was no easy way of comparing them. 

It was clear that we needed some centralized way. That was one problem. 

The other problem was that none of these tools - they were mostly scripts that people wrote - could work at that nanosecond precision that Corvil gives us. Market data has moved on and the trading has moved on where that kind of granularity matters. Whereas before we could probably get away with it - the millisecond range was okay for us - now, we need to know things like spending this amount on a Solarflare card adds 50 microseconds. We need to be able to measure that 50 microseconds, which was something we couldn't do before.

To my knowledge, we were not using a prior solution. Before Corvil, there were manual scripts which were running on the servers. This is not the best solution. So, we went to Corvil. 

Previoiusly, it was more of a manual thing, just scripting and getting the stats.

We had so many applications. The flow was getting bigger and larger everyday. Therefore, it made sense to have a better tool which was more automated, like Corvil.

The company did not have a previous solution for market data monitoring. They decided to purchase this solution for visibility into market data, order routing, and market data feeds.