Even if this product allowed you to have picosecond processing of market data and generation of trading signals, if you don't have exchange co-location, inherent network latency in your market data from providers and order routing to exchanges will make this thing pretty useless. For a hobbyist, throw leased lines out the door, now a Linode box, even a desktop running Windows XP with full-blown Nagle's algorithm, would have good-enough performance unless you can pour serious capital into a project.

They're also very vague on the software architecture or framework "kit". They don't say which feeds they support or if they provide any domain-specific data structures/standard trading algorithms like VWAP (slicing an order up over the day to give you "better" fills). I do see mention of an optional Feed Parser reference design, which I can't ascertain much value from. I am guessing it is mostly a generic kit for writing on their specialized hardware, and not specific to trading. There will be a lot of pain, maybe impossible to take vendor or open source libraries for market feed handling and compile it down using their embedded libraries. You'll be stuck doing tons of TCP/IP work, fun for hacking, but relative to the latency issues in your market data/order routing, it won't help you profit. Most people buy these appliances with included feed support.

With a big budget and co-location, this may be useful in bootstrapping some really low-level processing of market data, although there are a variety of hardware and software messaging solutions that would be a good alternative in driving latency lower if you have some money, Solace (HW), Tibco, 29West, etc to name a few.

I wish there was a hobbyist solution out there, but sorry, my initial impression says this isn't it. I would like more information, but maybe there are better hobbyist efforts out there. Interactive Brokers API isn't bad, and here's a full-blown real open-source trading kit that has a similar business model to MySQL. http://www.marketcetera.com/ Note: I feel that there are a few issues with this as well in some of the technologies they chose (JMS, Eclipse RCP).