Corvil - the microsecond, measured in Dublin

The product is worth describing precisely, because it is the one corner of this catalogue where a network is measured in the currency of the application running on it. Where a conventional monitoring tool reports utilisation and errors, Corvil reports feed latency and gaps, tick-to-trade times and fill ratios, with the network symptoms behind them, retransmissions, congestion and round-trip times, at one-second resolution. A millisecond has a price on a trading floor, and the analytics were built to state it.

On 9 July 2019 Pico, a New York provider of data-centre infrastructure, exchange connectivity and cloud services for the financial markets, signed a definitive agreement to acquire Corvil, expecting to close within thirty days; by late July the parties expected early August, and neither disclosed terms, both being privately held. The combined company was to serve more than four hundred banks, exchanges, asset managers, fintech vendors and trading firms across five continents, and Corvil's chief executive, Donal Byrne, became its chief technology officer. Pico itself operates some thirty-five data-centre locations and is minority-owned by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS and Wells Fargo.

Today the name survives as Corvil Analytics, described by Pico as its network-derived analytics platform for financial markets: lossless packet capture and deep protocol decoding at up to 200 gigabits per second sustained, metrics for every order, tick and fill across the trading lifecycle. The Dublin engineering that began as university research is now the measurement layer of a Wall Street infrastructure company, which is a long way to travel on the strength of knowing exactly when a packet arrived.