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Company

  •   How do you pronounce your name?
    • Similar to X-Files, i.e. X-ignite.
  •   How long have you been in business?
    • Xignite has been in business since January 2000. Xignite was a pioneer of the web service economy. We were one of the first vendors to monetize web services as standalone packaged products, aiding the rapid development of Service Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs). Today, Xignite web services are used to power hundreds of mission-critical applications; from proprietary systems handling hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate loans to systems trading gold, crude oil, or currencies around the clock and around the world.
  •   How many clients do you have?
    • As of December 2009, Xignite has more than 600 clients in 40 countries around the globe. Our clients include some of the world's largest and most renowned companies as well as many less well-known, but just as important, clients. The nature of our business allows us to serve large and small companies equally well.
  •   What does Xignite, Inc. do?
    • Xignite is the largest provider of financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications. Our mission is to power and inspire the next generation of service-oriented financial applications. By collecting, organizing and integrating financial information that is otherwise scattered, raw or only available in bulk form, Xignite offers the broadest integrated suite of financial web services available today on an on-demand platform, with more than 40 solutions covering market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, statistics and more.

      Xignite focuses on the developing frontier of the $7 billion financial market data industry. The company leads in the market category of on-demand financial web services - a term it coined in 2003, which describes a new way of delivering business-critical financial market information to applications.
  •   What is a pure-play web service provider?
    • A 'pure play' web service provider is a firm whose only products are web services delivered over the internet or who delivers web services on a subscription basis independently from other offerings.

      Over the last few years many traditional software providers or online service providers have started offering web services in complement of their core offering (for instance, SalesForce.com offers web services as part of its Software-As-A-Service application offering). Such companies are not pure-play providers. Other leading companies, like Amazon.com, have begun offering web services separately from their core business. These offerings are pure-play.

      As a pure-play provider of web service, Xignite understands better than anyone else how to deliver what applications developers need: web services that speed development and can handle the most demanding mission critical requirements. Xignite's developer web site sets the standard of how web services should be delivered for maximum developer productivity and minimum operational costs.
  •   What is a web service?
    • A web service is simply a software 'function' (or operation) that can be accessed by another application over the Internet.
      Prior to web services, integrating remotely located applications was complex and involved proprietary interface. Developers had to spend hours digging into hundreds of pages of documents, learning about protocols, agreeing on ways to communicate, debugging these things back and forth before they could get two programmers to talk to one another.

      With web services, all this goes away. A developer writing an application in Visual Basic in Singapore can access functionality delivered by another application written in Java located in Paris as easily as if these functions were running on her own desktop. Work that used to take weeks can now be done in minutes. Using a web service only takes two lines of code.
  •   What standards define a web service?
    • Web services were enabled by the introduction and the broad adoption of of three related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards: XML, SOAP, and WSDL; (pronounced 'Wisdle').

      'Web Service' can be a confusing term because it is so generic. After all many people and companies provide their 'services' over the 'web'. But only those 'functions' that support the three standards above are true 'web services'.
  •   Why are web services important?
    • Web services could become the greatest invention since the hyperlink. They could have the same impact on how web companies do business as the ability to navigate the web (using hyperlinks) changed our individual lives.

      Imagine a world where IT organizations were able to build and adapt business applications as easily as browsing the web for answers. That business would be swift, responsive, and able to serve its customers well. Just like the web put rivers of information within a mouse-click's reach of everyone, web services will make mountains of reusable functionality available with only two lines of code. This availability will progressively enable that vision.
  •   Is a web service the right solution for me?
    • Our web services are used to power applications that require access to financial market data or functionality. If you need to display or use financial market data in an application, then our web services are for you.
  •   What are web services great for?
    • Web services are the ideal technology for any application requiring 'snapshot' access to information, which should cover almost 99% of your requirements. There are, however, a few things web services are not great for:
      1. Provide continuous feeds of information. If you need a continuous connection to the market in order to collect massive amounts of information, then web services are not the option. For such implementations, a continuous connection is needed (instead of the request-based web service model). Web services are however quite efficient at delivering large quantities of frequent snapshot information (e.g. hundreds of quotes every second).
      2. Delivering very large amounts of information in one step. If you need to download a 500Mb file once a day, web services would not be the most efficient way to do this. Methods like ftp downloads are better suited to these types of applications.
  •   What is the real source of your data?
    • Our data sources are:
      1. ddfPlus (exchange consolidator) for delayed equity and future quotes. We have separate agreements with each exchange.
      2. Tenfore (interest rates, metal rates, forex rates, global equity quotes).
      3. NTIS (World News)
      4. Dow Jones (index data, interest rate ata)
      5. NASDAQ/INET (real-time quotes)
      6. SEC (Edgar data, insider data)
      7. Zacks (earning estimates)
      8. Econoday (economic calendars)
      We collect the rest of our data ourselves from public sources (fed, central banks...).
  •   I need a web service you do not have, what do I do?
    • If we do not have something you are looking for, please do not hesitate to contact us and let us know. If the costs associated make sense for us to add a particular service, we will let you know. We are constantly adding new web services based on client feedback.
  •   Where can I find historical intraday stock prices?
    • You can find historical intraday stock prices and other historical intraday data using XigniteQuotes or XigniteRealTime. The operation used to find historical intraday stock prices is GetHistoricalTicksAsOfDate found here.
  •   What environment did you use to develop your services?
    • All our services were developed using Microsoft.Net, including ASP.Net. Microsoft has done an awesome job with its web services solution, which translates into affordability and ease-of-use for our clients.

      If you are in the process of chosing what platform to use to deploy your applications, we highly recommend Microsoft.Net.
  •   What web services standards do you support?
    • We support the following standards: XML, WSDL, SOAP, and RST.

      We will support more advanced standards, like WS-Security, if our clients request them.
  •   What does it take to implement this service?
    • All you need is a SOAP toolkit or regular XML programming. (See 'Get Started')

      You should be able to bring the service into your application within minutes.
  •   What kind of response time can I expect?
    • Because our web service operations are so diverse, providing some data sets with a lot of information and some with a little, the response times will vary depending on the nature of the request. Similarly, if you search for multiple symbols at a time the operation will take longer to respond than if you had only searched for one.

      Generally, most operations returning small data sets (less than a page of data) will have sub-second response time. Are quote operations are specially designed to be extremely fast. Operations returning larger data sets (large historical time series or lists) could take more than a second.

      We constantly strive to provide the highest performance for your business needs. If you are looking for guaranteed response please contact us.
  •   Where is your price list?
    • You can find the complete product listing along with its pricing here.
  •   Why are some of your services free?
    • Our objective is to develop web services that solve problems and add value so that our clients are willing to pay a fair price for them. Some of our services are free, there are two possible reasons for that:
      1. The service is under beta testing and we are not yet charging for it, or
      2. The service is in early stage of its lifecycle. We developed it and made it available to our clients to gauge interest in a commercial version of this service. If the service becomes popular, we will develop a commercial version.
  •   I do not use .DotNet, can I still use your web services?
    • Yes. The beauty of web services is that thanks to standards such as WSDL, you can access and consume them no matter what toolkit you use. Understand that since we are not very familiar with non-DotNet toolkits, we do not provide specific support for them.
  •   Do you make your web services available for educational purposes?
    • We will gladly make our services available at no charge to educational institutions for special projects or coursework. Please contact us at info@xignite.com or call us at 650-655-3700.
  •   Can I display the data from your web services in our public web site?
    • It depends on the service and on the type of web site you want to display the data. Specifically, services that provide data protected by copyrights cannot be used on public web sites. The table below lists what you can do for each of our services:

      We distinguish between the following applications:
      1. Public Web Site: Web site or portal open to anyone and for which access is not limited to specific users or subscribers.
      2. Subscription Only Web Site: Web site or portal available only to specific users or subscribers (for instance, a "client-only area" in a financial institution web site).
      3. Intranet Web Site or Application: Web site, portal, or application (including web services) available only to employees and contractors of a firm.


      Note that redistribution of the Xignite data as a public web Service is not authorized.
      Service Public Web Site Subscription Only Web Site Intranet Web Site or Application
      Quotes
      XigniteInvestorRelations Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteRealTime Not Allowed Allowed. Your must report each end-user and pay exchange fees. Allowed. Your must report each end-user and pay exchange fees.
      XigniteNASDAQLastSale Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteQuotes Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteChart Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteHistorical Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteGlobalHistorical Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteFunds Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteIndices Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteMetals Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteCurrencies Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteRates Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteFutures Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteEnergy Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteInterBanks Not Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteInterMoneyMarkets Not Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteOptions Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteVWAP Allowed Allowed Allowed
      News
      XigniteNews Not Allowed. Articles are copyrighted. Allowed Allowed
      XigniteReleases Allowed Allowed Allowed
      Company & SecurityInfo
      XigniteFinancials Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteFundamentals Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteFinancials Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteAnalysts Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteEstimates Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteCompensation Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteSecurity Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteScreener Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteSecurity Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteHoldings Top 20 Holders/Holdings only Allowed Allowed
      XigniteMaster Not Allowed Allowed Allowed
      Markets
      XigniteExchanges Allowed Allowed Allowed
      Filings
      XigniteEdgar Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteInsider Allowed Allowed Allowed
      Wealth Management
      Statistics
      XigniteStatistics Allowed Allowed Allowed
      XigniteHousing Allowed Allowed Allowed
      Service Management
      XigniteDocumentation Not Applicable
      XigniteRegistration Not Applicable
      Data Management
      XigniteNote Not Applicable
      XigniteDataSet Not Applicable
      XigniteArchive Not Applicable
      Compliance
      XigniteVWAP Requires Approval Requires Approval Allowed
 

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