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Open Source software has been at the heart of modern financial institutions and capital markets for several years. The Open Source model for developing software is now also taking root in the Financial Services sector thanks in part to the OpenMAMA collaborative effort run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

OpenMAMA is an effort to build an open source implementation of the MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API) that financial services companies use for passing data across messaging applications. OpenMAMA was first announced in 2011. The OpenMAMA project includes big names in the financial services sector such as Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan and NYSE Technologies, among others.

"The OpenMAMA project represents how collaborative development can advance technology innovation for an entire industry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. "In just one year, the project contributors have open sourced and expanded upon a project that reduces complexity and cost for financial services companies."

This week the project reached its one year milestone, showing both progress and commercial implementations. Many of those commercial implementation have been achieved by creating software bridges that enable existing platforms to communicate via OpenMAMA.

Linux vendor Red Hat is no stranger to financial services markets, and is actively participating in the OpenMAMA effort. Red Hat worked on an AMQP implentation leveraging the Apache Qpid project. AMQP is an open standard enterprise messaging approach that is now an optional middleware bridge to OpenMAMA.

William Henry, senior consulting software engineer, Office of the CTO at Red Hat, explained to Datamation that OpenMAMA is a standard open API for developers that provides a layer of abstraction on top of underlying messaging systems, both standard (like AMQP) and proprietary.

"OpenMAMA uses bridges to provide a link between the OpenMAMA API layer and the underlying middleware messaging system," Henry said. "In order to provide AMQP support, OpenMAMA required a AMQP bridge. AMQP is just a standard and so they approached Red Hat to provide a AMQP bridge by building a Qpid bridge -- as Qpid implements the AMQP standard."

Henry added that by providing the Qpid/AMQP bridge, Red Hat is enabling OpenMAMA users to take advantage of Qpid in their OpenMAMA implementations. With the Qpid/AMQP bridge users can take advantage of OpenMAMA for its benefits at the developer layer and at the same time take advantage of the open standard AMQP at the protocol layer.

Red Hat is no stranger to the financial services markets. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently the operating system of choice that has been powering the NYSE since at least 2008.

NYSE Technologies is taking the OpenMAMA initiative even further with the launch of its OpenMAMA Enterprise Edition.

According to NYSE Technologies, the Enterprise Edition of OpenMAMA is a tested and certified distribution of OpenMAMA and provides an open, vendor-neutral integration layer for middleware messaging. At NYSE Technologies, OpenMAMA has become a core component of its Open Platform effort.

"Through our enterprise distribution and third party certification program we are working with our customers, partners and competitors to create the best solutions for our clients on an open, multi-vendor platform," Don Henderson, CTO of NYSE Technologies stated."The NYSE Technologies Open Platform demonstrates our commitment to promoting and operating a marketplace where success is driven by innovation, value and quality through collaboration."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.