29West

Infobox_Company
company_name = 29West
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = 2002
location_city = Warrenville, Illinois
location_country = USA
key_people = Mark Mahowald, Founder & CEO Todd Montgomery, Principal Software Architect | industry = Software
products = LBM, UME
num_employees = 30 (2008)
homepage = [http://www.29west.com/ www.29west.com]
footnotes =

29West Inc. 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 competitor is TIBCO Software.

History

Shortly after Talarian Corporation merged with TIBCO Software inc. 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 [T. Montgomery, co-author [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3208 RFC 3208] ] and implemented PGM. One early customer was [http://www.wombatfs.com/ Wombat Financial Software] who was looking for a high performing alternative to other commercial messaging products in the market at the time.In June 2004, 29West announced Wombat as its first messaging customer, and in November 2004 announced the general availability release of their initial product offering, LBM (Latency Busters Messaging). In late 2006, 29West released their second major product, UME (Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise).

29West's primary customers are banks, trading firms, and exchanges.

Products

29West's core product is LBM (Latency Busters Messaging). Although LBM supports multiple protocols (TCP, Unicast UDP, Multicast UDP), its primary emphasis is on 29West's proprietary Reliable Multicast protocol. LBM offers topic-based publish/subscribe semantics without a central server. Its primary design goal is to minimize latency. Customers incorporate LBM into their own software via the LBM API.

A more recent product from 29West is UME (Ultra Messaging for the Enterprise). This product leverages the LBM API, but adds delivery confirmation, durable subscriptions, late join support and other persistence-related functionality.

Notes

External references

* [http://www.29west.com/ Company site]
* [http://www.29west.com/links/messaging.html High Performance, Low Latency Messaging: Where is the Market Headed?] - origin of LBM design.
* [http://www.29west.com/docs/THPM/ Topics in High-Performance Messaging] - General information on messaging, not specific to 29West or LBM.