In recent years the financial services industry has migrated towards conducting business electronically. It is increasingly recognized that trading electronically is faster, cheaper, and less error-prone than trading by telephone. Standardized protocols such as FIX have been developed to facilitate the electronic communication of transactional information between trading partners. As a result, private networks have seen a surge of demand for secure and reliable IP-based communication services that offer higher levels of security, reliability and support than the Internet.

ITFIX is an implementation of the FIX protocol as defined in the FIX Protocol specification. It implements both the session-level and the application-level protocol. It uses TCP/IP to connect a session initiator to a session acceptor. It is implemented as a database table interface. This gives the user the big benefit of cross-platform portability, and the ability to link to ITTRADER. ITFIX is a 100% Pure Java engine that implements the complete 3.0, 4.0, 4.1,and 4.2 versions of the FIX Protocol Specification. It is multi-threaded with 2 independent threads per FIX session, giving it tremendous throughput and performance. Message reception is notified through callbacks leading to further improved performance. It is portable to any platform that has a JDK 1.1.x implementation. The engine can be used in the same process as the user's application, or as a separate process that is accessed through IIOP, MQ Series messages, SmartSockets messages, or TIB/Rendezvous messages.