Morgan Stanley Japan needed to provide real time order book information (bids and asks) from the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) to securities dealers, brokers and salespeople across the trading floor.

The required information was only available on a limited number of dedicated terminals manufactured by Toshiba, supplied by the exchange, and linked by leased lines to exchange systems. The number of customers for the data exceeded the number of terminals available, and the data was not available for integration with other trading floor applications.

No documentation or assistance from the TSE or Toshiba was available for interfacing to this completely closed proprietary system. The existing Toshiba system in use was based on a proprietary non-standard network communication protocol.

Morgan Stanley Japan approached Fusion Systems with a request to create a solution to emulate the terminals, injecting simulated requests for the required bid/ask information and intercepting for the returned data on the wire. The data would then have to be transformed into a standard format for feeding into the existing digital data distribution platform for use by trading floor applications.

Fusion Systems consultants used protocol hardware and software to analyze and reverse engineer the client/server protocol used by the system. The analysis was used to prototype a simulated terminal in software that could act in place of a real terminal.

Testing of the prototype against the exchange systems had to be conducted on the live production systems and co-ordinated with dealers in order to avoid interference with live trading operations.

Several iterations of analysis, prototyping and testing provided sufficient understanding to permit design and implementation of a custom data-feed server to gateway between the closed system and the client's trading floor distribution network.

The eventual solution was successfully developed, tested and deployed within 3 months of project initiation.