| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | Warrenville, Illinois, USA |
| Key people | Mark Mahowald, Founder & CEO Todd Montgomery, Principal Software Architect |
| Products | LBM, UME |
| Employees | 50 (2009) |
| Website | www.29west.com |
29West Inc., now a business unit of Informatica (INFA), is a computer networking software company based in the Chicago area (USA) specializing in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). 29West has offices in the Chicago area, New York City, London, and Tokyo.
The company's major competitors are TIBCO Software, Tervela, Solace Systems and more recently IBM (with their WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging product). 29West was acquired by Informatica on Mar. 22, 2010, which continues to develop and sell its products under the umbrella name "Ultra Messaging"[1].
29West's primary customers are banks, trading firms, and exchanges.
Contents |
Shortly after Talarian Corporation merged with TIBCO Software in April 2002, Mark Mahowald (COO of Talarian) founded 29West, Inc. In mid 2003, 29West began to focus on the market for high speed messaging and approached a number of firms with the goal of creating a new MOM product. In early 2004, Todd Montgomery joined 29West as the senior architect. Todd had earlier helped define[2] and implement the PGM protocol. One early 29West customer was Wombat Financial Software (now NYSE Technologies). In June 2004, 29West announced Wombat as its first messaging customer, and in November 2004 announced the general availability release of their initial product, LBM (Latency Busters Messaging). In late 2006, 29West released their second major product, UME (Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise). In 2008, 29West released two new products, UMDS and UMCache. In 2009, 29West released a shared memory-based IPC transport. In 2010, 29West released a message queue-based product "UMQueue".
29West was acquired by Informatica on Mar. 22, 2010. Informatica continues to develop and sell the same products under the umbrella name "Ultra Messaging".
29West's streaming product is LBM (Latency Busters Messaging). Although LBM supports multiple protocols (TCP, Unicast UDP, Multicast UDP), its primary emphasis is on the company's proprietary reliable multicast protocol. LBM offers topic-based publish/subscribe semantics without message brokers (daemons or servers). Its primary design goal is to minimize latency. Customers incorporate LBM into their own software via the LBM API.
29West's persistence product is UME (Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise). This product leverages the LBM API, but adds delivery confirmation, durable subscriptions and other persistence-related functionality.
UMCache (Ultra Messaging Cache) extends 29West Messaging to support message archival and replay, plus a Last Value Cache.
UMDS (Ultra Messaging Desktop Services) is a system designed to help incorporate slower desktop applications into the 29West multicast backbone. By filtering out unwanted traffic and publishing TCP streams directly to end consumers, UMDS offers a simple way to bridge the gap between these different classes of computers and applications.
UMQueue (Ultra Messaging Queue) adds message queueing semantics to the UME product, allowing load balancing and de-coupling of source and receiver.