Lightstreamer, the software made in Italy like NASA (and … – economyup

  Fantechi Mauro and Alessandro Alinone, co-CEO of Lightstreamer The concept of Italian can be applied also to the software ? The founders of Lightstreamer, an Italian company that manufactures platforms for sending data in real time on the Internet , used it as a communication tool for ten years. And it is probably also due to this that the software company, which is based in Milan in the business center Copernicus , has been able to market their product in all five continents, from the bigger countries like the United States to those of you rarely hear about how the Bhutan , which required the software license Lightstreamer for their financial bag.

The product is a software for sending data that changes over time . “ is a technology ‘push’ why are not the end-user client server requesting to query the server providing the data on the updates, but the server itself to ‘shoot’ when there are “he says Alexander Alinone , co-CEO and co-founder of Lightstreamer (with Mauro Fantechi and Giampaolo Vianello ). “ If you query, for example, the server every 5 seconds, but the data changes every 20 seconds, it wastes bandwidth even if nothing changes: a cost more, which reduces the quality of service and without the given real time . “

The practical applications of this technology are numerous: in online trading There are many operators who use it to get in real time on their terminals; in the world of media TV stations can use it to provide updates on televoting, applause and other services; in ‘ aerospace you may need for example to get real-time telemetry of the International Space Station; or even, in the gaming for information on betting and to interact with the online casino.

Among the Customer of the Italian company stand out names such as NASA , Morgan Stanley , Bank of America , UBS , Societe Generale , Unicredit , Intesa Sanpaolo , Sky , Rai and Bwin . The management consulting firm Gartner in 2012 called Lightstreamer (since 2004, the year it was founded, until October 2015, was called Weswit while Lightstreamer was only the product name) “ Cool vendor “and the two co-CEO claim to be among the” world leaders in terms of market share among commercial competitors . “

The software and the company are born from the observation of a need explicit. “ In the early 2000s I was working in the system integrator Par-Tec , which Mauro Fantechi was a partner, and was planning online trading platforms for Italian banks: the ‘customer need was to receive real-time data “, says Alessandro Alinone, 44, a computer engineer with management studies at Bocconi. “ At that moment, the system used to this sort of thing was Java applet, but had a lot of contraindications “. And the need to create a startup ad hoc, short step: “When we were in Par-Tec, we have been working on a solution based on push technology and we handled it ‘spinoff’ founding a separate company and putting the software on the market “, says Mauro Fantechi, 52, who can be considered the home Lightstreamer serial entrepreneur, having founded in career three companies.

 8:00 to 9:00 in the first years of life, until 2012, Lightstreamer (which has a team of about ten people) grew year-on-year. Then, from 2013 to today, it has gradually stabilized and now travels around 1.6 million euro of revenues, which is roughly the turnover with which the company expects to have closed 2015
 “ We operate in a niche market autofinanziandoci the research and development without the help of outside investment ,” says Fantechi. “ Paradoxically, despite the technology push of data has 15 years of life, is still alive and has yet to explode – according to experts such as Gartner – in numerical terms: the potential that has not yet been fully expressed, is in perennial startup conceptual . “

In the future, it will be the ‘ Internet of things to have an increasing need for data exchange in real time. “It is possible that the increase in demand, and we are gearing up,” said the CEO. “ But before the market will be flooded with sensors and IoT is not yet well “. Meanwhile, the founders of Lightstreamer work in differentiate the product so you have focalizations more specific depending on the scope and prepare to “spin” their product with other Standard messaging . All this, to stay in Italy. “Even if 95% of our customers are abroad, we are here for sentimental reasons.” Otherwise, talk of software made in Italy would be less appropriate.