RTI Has Google to Thank

Real Time Innovations Inc. (RTI), spun off from a Stanford University robotics research group, has been providing real-time middleware to the aerospace and defense industries for about a dozen years. Its systems are used to coordinate communications for transportation, intelligence and simulations, so that information picked up by a radar system, for instance, can be fed into a larger data pool where it can then be analyzed, prioritized and responded to in real time.
So, what was RTI, a company with deep roots in the industrial embedded systems market, doing at the SIFMA financial markets conference and expo that began today in New York City? “It’s about real-time, low-latency messaging,” RTI vice president David Barnett told me over breakfast. He said RTI is partnering with a consulting company called Zivlyn Systems LLC to develop a trading platform designed specifically to handle higher volumes and replace legacy trading systems. RTI created a “data cloud” configuration that allows applications to subscribe to it, and RTI figures out the message switching and routing, as well as providing caching, filtering and other services. (The company also announced extended support for the .NET Framework and languages, to create a single infrastructure to support high-performance trading in heterogeneous environments.)
But how does a company servicing the military-industrial complex get a foot in the door in the financial markets? “They came to us, actually,” Barnett said. “Google is how they found us. We talk about low-latency and real time and high throughput, and those were the keywords they found us with. It turns out these are real problems in this market.”
Now, RTI is on the financial world's radar.

-- David Rubinstein