CEC Mulls Responses To Rfp For New Price Reporting System

The Commodities Exchange Center this spring will select a vendor to upgrade its 10-year-old price reporting system. Goals for the new system include acceleration of price input and reporting to information vendors, miniaturization and more timely and direct control over the content and display format of the system.

Competitive bidding for the new CEC price reporting system coincides with the New York Mercantile Exchange's recent announcement that it will consider linking up to Globex, the after-hours trading network being developed by Reuters Holdings PLC and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Rich Inc., a Reuters subsidiary, is among those bidding on the project.

The CEC provides space and facilities for five independent commodities exchanges: the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange, the Commodity Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange and, most recently, the New York Futures Exchange.

The CEC's existing price reporting system is based on Quotron Q801 and Q1000 controllers. Like other Quotron customers, the CEC must wait for new tapes to be cut when changes in display format or content are needed. The CEC wants more immediate control over its information destiny.

Quotron Systems Inc. is one of eight firms bidding on the project, which is estimated to be worth about $5 million. Other bidders include AT&T, DEC with SPC Software Sciences Inc., IBM with Femcon Associates, Rich's special developments group with FD Consulting and Stratus, Sequent Computer Systems Inc. with Arthur Andersen & Co., Tandem Computers with Logica Systems Inc. and Teknekron Software Systems Inc..

AGS Information Services Inc., a software consulting company owned by NYNEX, developed the RFP for the new price reporting system and will advise on the selection of finalists. A bake-off involving demonstations and detailed implementation plans from two or three finalists will begin in March.

"Nothing will be drastically different," says James Neal, general manager of the CEC. "We're not planning on changing our trading system or anything like that. We still want to take the trades in, turn them around, massage them and pump them out to our vendors just as quickly as we can."

To that end, the RFP calls for data entry to occur at the rate of two prices per second per input clerk. This requirement is bound to elicit plans for Buck Rogers applications of touchscreen and speech recognition technology.

Further, turnaround -- the time between price entry and transmission to quote vendors -- is expected to be reduced to less than one second. Those familiar with the existing system say turnaround currently ranges from three to five seconds.

The CEC also wants greater connectivity, as well as direct, immediate control over content and display attributes right down to the data element level. Whether off-the-shelf relational database management software can be applied in the context of sub-second price reporting is doubtful.

The price reporting project will likely involve the development of an internal ticker plant capable of combining internally generated price data with real-time information from other exchanges. Price data from Chicago and London futures exchanges will be handled by the new price reporting system for side-by- side display with internally generated prices in the trading pits, sources say.

When the New York Futures Exchange joined the CEC last year, stand-alone Quotron terminals were brought in to provide access to New York Stock Exchange and other external data sources. Prior to the arrival of the NYFE, the price reporting system's data requirements were satisfied internally.

"We want the new system to be able to interface with any kind of peripheral equipment you might find on the floor, whether it's LED screens or color screens for graphics displays," says Neal. "That's one thing we can't do with our current system."

Quote vendors will be pleased to learn that with the new price reporting system, the CEC data feed will conform to the Interexchange Technical Committee's standard record format. The ITC, whose membership includes all U.S. futures exchanges, is working toward implementation of a common data feed protocol. To date, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have converted to the ITC specification.