In fact, the data tide is already rising, according to panelists at last week's Amsterdam Financial Information Summit.

"We are already seeing volumes growing. Trading volumes from Euronext doubled between January 2007 and January 2008... and with new venues planned from Turquoise and Nasdaq, we need to know if they will keep on growing at that rate," said Andre Kelekis, head of market data strategy at BNP Paribas.

In addition, Adrian Farnham, chief operating officer of multilateral trading facility Turquoise, said the advent of multiple venues trading the same stocks has created a situation where "for any given security, there will be more than one price that we have to pull back together.... So one challenge data from trading venues in a meaning till way so that traders can use the data."

An exacerbating factor to this challenge is the legacy architectures still in place at many firms, which undertake their own development, and can only support low bandwidth capacity, according to Henk Huibers, Netherlands country manager at fiber networking provider euNetworks.

However, the initial fragmentation could yield benefits later. "Once these new venues gain significant share... there should be downward pressure on prices," Farnham said. "Lower pricing structures and more venues will generate more activity... and we expect that smart order routing will be essential for anyone serious about being in the order execution business going forward, and that execution policies will have to become more sophisticated over time."

Kelekis proposed several remedies for dealing with rising volumes, such as more bandwidth and better network management tools, as well as utilizing bandwidth reducing such as FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming data), and new middleware solutions.though he also says that some responsibility lies with data sources to provide segregated feeds that allow users to filter out irrelevant data.