Bonneville Telecom Reorganizes Data Unit To Emphasize Financial Information, Network Services

Bonneville Telecommunications Corp. has reorganized its Data Systems Division into two operating units, one to focus on selling market data products and the other to peddle network services. The changes are said to reflect Bonneville's move out of a development stage and into a marketing/sales stage.

The new Financial Information Services unit will be headed by Charlie McQuinn, the former Burroughs Corp. executive who joined Bonneville last summer as vice president, marketing. Data Network Services will by run by Kay Rasmussen, who also joined BTC last year from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

"Minor staff reductions" have taken place, says BTC president Ken Bentley, "mostly related to shifting the way we sell financial products -- away from the one-on-one type sales [and] to more mass marketing approaches." Bonneville will emphasize telemarketing and dealer participation to push its Apple Macintosh and IBM-PC-based stock, option, and commodity products.

BTC expects "to launch a number of additional products in the financial area" within the next few months, Bentley says. There could be as many as ten "variations on a theme," he says, the theme being the recently-introduced Macstock and Macmonitor products. One introduction is likely to be an IBM-PC version of Macstock.

Bentley contrasts BTC's planned approach with that taken by Lotus Development Corp. in the roll-out of its Signal product which, like Bonneville, uses FM sideband for data delivery. "We think they're doing it wrong," he says. "The market we see isn't going to justify a $2 million advertising budget." Nevertheless, Bentley forecasts "tens of thousands" of prospective customers for its equities data services.

"Our focus is going to be on more the wealthy investor who doesn't want to mess around with installing things himself," Bentley says. "You don't install one of [Lotus's] twin-lead antennas and expect to get high-quality data in many areas of metropolitan areas where they're selling them."

"More limited" is how Bentley describes the market for futures data, which has been Bonneville's primary product. "We'll just continue to milk that with good products and low price and compete with the other vendors for the limited market that there is."

Bonneville "could likely see doing more joint work together" with Commodity Quotations, Inc., says Bentley. In a reciprocal arrangement, BTC resells the CQI quote stream to BTC's customers, while providing CQI with a data pipeline to CQI's own customers.