CORE DUMP

For a bank with a relatively small trading operation, ABN- Amro continues to have a significant impact on Hewlett- Packard's standing in the trading room market. At the SIA show in New York last month, BT North America displayed the first all-UNIX version of its top-of-the-line OTSview data distribution and workstation software system -- running on H-P boxes. BT officials said then that the decision to put the new version on H-Ps (rather than, say, Sun SPARCstations) was driven "by customer request." And while they declined to name the customer, subsequent digging turned up ABN-Amro. ABN and its parent Lasalle Bank have a corporation-wide commitment to H-P (TST, April 5). Of course, BT didn't win the data distribution RFP contest at ABN's planned new Chicago Treasury trading room (TST, May 17), Teknekron did. BT wasn't even in ABN's final four. But sources say BT is still eager to land ABN's telephony, video-switching and keyboard consolidation work. Meanwhile, sources say that Telerate Trading Room Systems has made considerable headway at Lasalle. Stay tuned.

Sources say Lehman Brothers Inc.'s London office signed with Reuters to install Triarch 2000 at nearly 400 positions. The implementation will replace a Micrognosis video-switching system and will incorporate systems from TCAM, as well as Lehman's proprietary fixed-income data display system known as Finesse. While previously Lehman was positioning Finesse as a full-fledged digital data distribution system, now it intends to run it as an application on Reuters' platform. The deal includes 170 Advanced Trader Workstations and 220 Personal Trader Workstations.

Sun Microsystems held a big pow-wow at a Florida resort last week for its sales managers. While the content of that meeting couldn't be determined at press time, sources say likely subjects include the much-whispered-about revamp of the vendor's VAR channel -- a restructuring that some say will put a greater emphasis on direct sales. In addition, sources say Sun may announce further cuts to its sales force. Sun has had trouble with the VAR channel of late, and has initiated investigations of some of its top resellers (TST, June 28).

Dow Jones Telerate has ported its PC-based, fixed-income- friendly Teletrac to run on its UNIX data distribution and display platform. Sources say the vendor sees Teletrac for UNIX as a direct competitor to Market Vision's much-touted Athena graphics package. Not coincidentally, the vendor has also hired Market Vision's Rafael Bailey to hawk Teletrac for UNIX. (Notable newsbite: Chase Manhattan Bank is apparently the largest user of Teletrac in the U.S.)

Leading Market Technologies -- the new home of former Lotus Realtime top dog Gary Meshell -- has announced a new pricing structure for its Expo software. Not quite a spreadsheet and not quite a graphics package, Expo is now available in a so-called "starter pack" -- which incorporates a 30 percent price cut. The announcement came from Meshell, who joined the vendor as sales and marketing director, following Lotus' abandonment of Realtime as a product worthy of further development (TST, July 12).

According to Chase Manhattan Bank foreign exchange executive and senior vice president Jim Borden, the bank's new back-office processing facility at the MetroTech center in Brooklyn now enables it to handle significantly more transaction volume than previously. The bank now processes about $1 trillion in transactions daily at the facility, he says.

Chicago's OptEdge Inc., seller of Apple Computer Macintosh-based options-trading systems, has converted its real-time database server from the Mac to UNIX boxes. The servers run Telekurs (North America) Inc.'s TDBS ticker software and receive the same vendor's 56 kilobit/second digital data feed. The new server runs on IBM's and Sun's UNIX boxes.

Reuters' marketing manager for client site systems, Marie Giangrande, has resigned her post to take a position with Hewlett-Packard, where she'll be involved in that vendor's effort to sell to the financial sector.