2010 Year in Review: Vendors Present New Faces for 2010

This year was one of facelifts among the major data vendors, while others resorted to more desperate operations in the battle for market share as end-users loosened their purse strings for strategic initiatives.

Dow Jones began the year by combining its Enterprise Media and Consumer Media Groups in a move designed to create a single operating structure and “unified voice” under Todd Larson, resulting in the departure of former EMG president Clare Hart (IMD, Jan. 11).

The evolving news space also saw several initiatives geared at incorporating news into algorithmic trading engines. Thomson Reuters, Acquire Media and Dow Jones all expanded their offerings (IMD, Jan 25; Nov. 8), while startup Selerity launched a service for identifying and analyzing unstructured and “unscheduled” news items for use in trading algorithms (IMD, March 5; Aug. 2).

But it was other facelifts by Thomson Reuters and rival Bloomberg that garnered the most attention. Thomson Reuters launched a new integrated data network dubbed Elektron that incorporates the vendor’s RMDS data platform and global hosting centers to deliver a 20-fold latency improvement for proximity hosting clients, officials say (IMD, April 26), and later unveiled its long-awaited new Eikon desktop platform—previously codenamed Project Utah—that will ultimately replace the vendor’s 3000 Xtra and Thomson One terminals (IMD, Sept. 13; Sept. 20).

Meanwhile, Bloomberg rolled out its latest Launchpad Windows-style interface, with new capabilities to allow users to more easily access, visualize and share data (IMD, June 21)—though the industry was still marveling at Bloomberg’s new marketing campaigns, subway ads and move to an “open” architecture (IMD, Nov. 2, 2009)—and also expanded the range of content available via its BVal evaluated pricing service (IMD, May 31; July 12).

Bloomberg’s expansion of BVal reflects growing demand for evaluated prices overall, which prompted SIX Telekurs to buy Complex Security Valuations and combine the smaller vendor with its own Fair Value Pricing service (IMD, April 19)—for which CSV already priced around 51,000 instruments on Telekurs’ behalf—and prompting the creation of Benchmark Solutions, an evaluated pricing startup combining Julius Finance with former credit derivative parsing software vendor Bquotes, backed by private equity firm Warburg Pincus (IMD, Dec. 13).

Warburg Pincus was also active elsewhere in the data business, acquiring—with Silver Lake—Interactive Data, another major player in evaluated pricing, for $3.4 billion (IMD, May 7) and shaking up the vendor’s senior management (IMD, Sept. 20; Nov. 15) as the new owners seek to aggressively grow the company.

Another new face on the block this year was Gissing Technology, founded by executives including Richard Gissing, who had sold his former, similarly named company Gissing Software to Thomson Reuters in 2008 (IMD, June 28), though the company soon underwent a facelift of its own, changing its name to MDX Technology to avoid confusion with the Reuters-acquired business (IMD, Aug. 16).

However, complex event processing, which had grown aggressively in recent years, was muted in 2010 as Aleri—which had acquired rival Coral8 the previous year—was unexpectedly snapped up by Sybase (IMD, Feb. 5), and tick database and CEP engine vendor Skyler Technology moved operations from California to London, with chief operating officer Mark Ford taking the reins (IMD, Feb. 12).

But while CEP contracted, latency monitoring expanded, with Corvil and Correlix signing up clients among end-users and trading venues, while TS-Associates, ITRS and SeaNet Technologies continued to gain traction, and the level of interest in monitoring and measurement prompted vendors like Endace—which supplies monitoring probes to SeaNet and Correlix—to begin offering their own solutions in this space (IMD, Aug. 16; Nov. 22).