Data Exchange Becomes First Wang Shark Reseller With VS-Based Portfolio Management System

Data Exchange, Inc. a New York maker of portfolio management software, has become the first third-party reseller to integrate Wang's Shark service with its own application. The result, called "DX/Shark," provides institutional money managers with real-time prices and analytics in addition to the usual portfolio accounting applications.

"The portfolio capability is something that is highly desirable and goes after a market were we might not necessarily be," says Larry Jones chief executive officer at Wang Financial Information Services Corp. "We look at it as expanding our marketplace with value-added applications."

The extent to which institutional investors demand real-time market data is a matter of some controversy. "I think it's growing," says Jones, but "I don't it's going to knock the socks off anybody." Nonetheless, money managers do need to price their portfolios regularly, and at a $100/month plus communications costs, DX/Shark is certainly price-competitive.

Last fall Wang announced VS Market Link, a set of programming tools an interfaces enabling third parties to integrate Shark data with applications running on Wang VS minicomputers (MTR, September 1986). DX/Shark is the first of what Jones hopes will be 6-8 such applications. Current VS resellers in the financial services market offer other portfolio management systems, research and analysis packages, and more elaborate real-time applications akin to program trading, he says.

"We're lookin at trying to put a major campaign in place to try to recruit more breadth of applications," says Jones. Examples would be third-party developers who might migrate to VS or who have peripheral applications that could somehow benefit from real-time market data.

In a similar vein, Wang is pushing its "Data Terminal" product. a set of Shark programming interfaces for personal computers. The firm hopes to recruit many of the third-party software companies who've developed graphics and analytics packages for PCs. One likely associate. says Jones, is Marketview Software, Inc., which he says can do more with Shark's interactive data feed than it can with the broadcast feeds it typically uses.