About

STAC®, the Securities Technology Analysis Center LLC, provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the trading industry, focusing on the most challenging workloads--from ultra-low latency to big-compute and big-data tasks. Our mission is to reduce the cost and time for trading organizations to evaluate technology, while simultaneously shrinking the sales cycle for vendors.

Trading organizations today face huge upward pressure on performance as well as downward pressure on costs. Technology vendors continue to supply new ways to meet those expectations. Vendors are innovating at every layer of the technology stack—from applications and middleware to operating environments, processors, co-processors, servers, networks, and storage.

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But filtering through these innovations in an objective way takes time and resources. STAC accelerates this process by providing research and tools based on testing standards developed by and for trading organizations. Here’s how it works.

STAC Benchmark Council™ - STAC facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council, a group of trading firms and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard methods for testing the performance of trading systems. The resulting STAC Benchmarks™ are the only technology benchmark specs tailored for today's trading business needs.

STAC Research™ - STAC engages with trading firms and vendors to measure the capabilities of new offerings, using industry standard STAC Test Harnesses™ (see below) or proprietary methodologies in cases where STAC Benchmark specifications are still in development. Whether public or private, STAC Reports™ serve as objective evidence of a system’s performance.  Public STAC Reports are made available on this web site to a rapidly growing subscriber base that has self-selected for its interest in the performance of real-time information and transactions. Members of the Council with an appropriate premium subscription can also request reports from the confidential STAC Vault™.

STAC Test Harnesses™ - STAC provides tools that enable end-user firms and vendors to run STAC Benchmarks in the privacy of their own labs. End-user firms can "mark their system to market" by making apples-to-apples comparisons with publshed STAC Reports. They can also use STAC Test Harnesses to run automated performance-related regression testing on a regular basis. Vendors can use internally-generated STAC Benchmarks to guide development, and they can call in STAC when they wish to publish an audited STAC Report. STAC Test Harnesses measure things such as latency, throughput, and integrity for discrete steps of the trading process. STAC Test Harnesses can also be customized to conduct tests other than the official benchmarks.

If you’d like to explore how the STAC process can benefit your organization, please contact us.

STAC is a tbdCorp company.

tbdCorp and the tbdCorp logo are trademarks of Technology Business Development Corporation.