Bloomberg Advances on Cloud Data Strategy

Bloomberg is in the process of shifting its entire data estate and commercial offerings to the cloud as part of what it is calling its One Data strategy.

According to Tony McManus, chief information officer and global business manager of enterprise data at Bloomberg, the migration process will be done in incremental stages and the company expects to release its first batch of datasets on to the cloud in Q1 2020.

“A lot of our clients are moving their machine learning or statistical analysis processing into the cloud. Therefore, having large volumes of historical time-series data available to them in native format is very important. That is the next big set of milestones on the roadmap,” McManus tells WatersTechnology.

Bloomberg also announced on September 12 that its flagship real-time market data feed, B-Pipe, will be rolled out globally through Amazon Web Services (AWS) PrivateLink, in conjunction with this wider strategy.

AWS PrivateLink is designed to eliminate exposure of data to the internet and to offer private connectivity between on-premise and virtual environments. Bloomberg says that B-Pipe streams 35 million instruments across all asset classes, including data from 330 exchanges and 5,000 contributors through a common API.

B-Pipe can now be deployed through three mechanisms: on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

Users can still visualize the data feed through a proprietary interface, a third-party application or the Bloomberg terminal.

“From the perspective of how they interface with Bloomberg data, very little changes. That is very important to us because we don’t want customers to think that there is some sort of compromise to the service as a consequence of moving their application into the cloud,” McManus said. He was speaking at a Bloomberg event on cloud adoption in the financial markets held in London on September 11.

“It’s not slower, you don’t get less data, it’s not that some services that aren’t available.”

In the coming months, the firm will make B-Pipe and other data services available through other cloud providers.

McManus says that Bloomberg is currently working with several global tier 1 banks and asset managers to deliver its real-time market data feed through Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

According to Andrey Rybka, head of computer architecture at Bloomberg, clients could leverage indirect operational cost efficiencies by opting for the cloud deployment option.

“There is a change in the model from capital expense (Capex) to operating expense (Opex),” Rybka said during the Bloomberg event. “With Capex you need money to buy large servers; here you can spin up a virtual machine and get per hour or per minute pricing depending on the cloud provider.”

Cost efficiencies are a major concern for data vendors like Bloomberg: these firms are at the center of a fierce debate about whether or not there has been a significant increase in the cost of market data over recent years, as many consumers of this data believe.