Salvatore Genovese

Cloud services provider Xignite announced it is working with Wolfram|Alpha, the world’s first computational knowledge engine. Under the agreement, Wolfram|Alpha has integrated Xignite Web services to provide powerful on-demand financial market data calculations for its users. Xignite Web services enabled Wolfram|Alpha to meet a tight development schedule and minimize infrastructure costs prior to its May 2009 launch.

Wolfram|Alpha generates powerful systematic results through real-time computations on its ever-growing internal knowledge base. Wolfram|Alpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span many domains and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support any domain that is based on systematic knowledge. The information Xignite delivers in response to the search is aggregated and analyzed by Wolfram|Alpha before it is returned to the user in the form of comprehensive charts and graphs for comparative study. By integrating Xignite Web services, Wolfram|Alpha can provide in-depth financial information for queries as simple as “biggest automotive company,” or as complex as “what is General Electric’s dividend per share in euros.” The integration also enables Wolfram|Alpha to return results in locally-adjusted currencies, based on real-time rates and location awareness.

Wolfram|Alpha is currently using Xignite Web services that includes real-time and historical stock prices, market indices, interest rates, currency exchange rates, commodity prices, and various economic statistics to power the majority of the market, financial and company information delivered in its search results. With Xignite, Wolfram|Alpha met its tight launch schedule by eliminating multiple years of development effort and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in extensive in-house market data infrastructure costs. Xignite is the industry’s leading provider of highly-scalable Web services that deliver a variety of on-demand financial market data, including stock prices, commodity futures and currency exchange rates.

"Wolfram|Alpha's goal is to be the single source for definitive answers to factual queries, and we rely on acquiring and processing data in a vast number of areas," said Peter Overmann, executive director of research and development at Wolfram Research, Inc. "In a climate where there's tremendous demand for financial tools and information, we've set out to create the best possible financial portal where all analyses and visualizations are calculated in real time, as users put in their questions. Xignite has met all of our expectations in terms of the scope, quality, and performance of its data services, and we look forward to working with the company as we expand Wolfram|Alpha."

“Traditional approaches to searching for financial information return incomplete and stale data, but the Wolfram|Alpha computable knowledge engine provides rich and meaningful results by integrating Xignite,” said Stephane Dubois, CEO, Xignite. “Wolfram|Alpha is offering superior value to their users and Xignite is proud to support their mission by reducing the cost and complexity of integrating financial information with our Web services.”

Xignite provides an extensive catalog of more than 50 categories of financial information delivered on-demand as industry standard Web services with simple, pay-as-you-go subscription pricing. Xignite customers simply visit its Web site, shop for what they need, sign-up and pay only for the data they use. There is no upfront risk or infrastructure investment in hardware, software, vendor tools or custom coding. Additionally, there are no ongoing requirements of system administration and maintenance.