AWS Case Study: Xignite

Xignite, a financial services start-up, provides an on-demand platform for delivering reliable financial market data to enterprise applications, portals, and websites for over 400 corporate clients all over the world, such as Citi, GE Commercial Finance, ING, Marsh & McLennan, kaChing, and Starbucks.

When Forbes.com, the No. 1 business news source in the world, approached Xignite about powering their real-time stock quotes, Xignite knew they needed an infrastructure solution that was equally scalable and cost-efficient.

Xignite’s leadership team looked for a solution that effectively and dynamically scaled their delivery of real-time financial information with minimal waste of computing and network resources. They found the cloud computing infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) a natural fit. “It was an obvious decision as Amazon is a leader in providing redundant computing infrastructure with multiple availability zones and a high level of economy of scale in computing and network bandwidth costs,” states Leo Chan, Chief Technical Officer of Xignite.

Currently, Xignite employs Amazon EC2 and S3 to power a host of on-demand application servers (which increase or decrease according to bell-curve traffic load), a redundant cluster of load-balancers, and cache financial information. As they roll out new services and new clients, they can quickly expand their computing infrastructure on AWS to improve scalability and reduce costs.

Using AWS, Xignite reduced their time-to-market by two months and saved thousands in personnel costs by not needing a full-time operations engineer to procure and install servers at an additional collocation space. “We estimate that the overall cost savings including hardware, infrastructure and network bandwidth, and personnel, is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” claims Chan.

Xignite especially appreciates that AWS provides zero up-front infrastructure costs and has higher efficiency in resource utilization. Chan explains, “Capacity is added during peak times and reduced off-peak and there is no need for standby capacity for redundancy. It is highly cost-prohibitive to achieve this with fixed capacity and traditional computing models.” Before moving to AWS, Xignite deployed their services on server clusters at a premium collocation facility with higher fixed costs with underutilized capacity.

With more than five years experience delivering financial web services to mission-critical applications, Xignite has learned a thing or two about best business practices. Xignite’s own cloud-based business model offers pay-as-you-go subscription pricing and easy-to-integrate Web widgets which gives their customers a simple solution at a significantly lower cost than traditional market data offerings.

To learn more, visit Xignite.com This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. or read how Xignite powers Forbes’ real-time stock quotes .