Deutsche Bank RFP Calls For Wang Terminal Emulation

Deutsche Bank AG and Deutsche Bank Capital Corp. of New York have issued a request for proposal for a new consolidated trading facility at 31 W. 52 St., the old E.F. Hutton premises. The new trading system is expected to accommodate 171 positions, expandable to 225.

The proposed trading facility will house six trading groups of varying sizes: U.S. Treasury securities (53), foreign exchange and treasury department (39), swaps (25), international equities and fixed income (27), U.S. equities (18) and domestic fixed income (9).

The RFP calls for more than 40 different types of inputs to the trader information system including AutEx, Bloomberg, Bridge, Tradecenter, Market Vision on both Sun workstations and RT PCs, digital feeds from RMJ and Chapdelaine, Reuters ART, Reuters Monitor Dealing Service, Telerate TDPF, Telerate's trading service, Instinet, Topic and a raft of others.

In addition to the usual wish list -- a single integrated workstation, real-time spreadsheet, composite paging, internal development toolkits -- the Deutsche Bank RFP specifies the use of nearly 100 Wang 280/380 PCs and about 50 contended-access 4320 terminal emulation ports.

That's the obvious question, but no one from Deutsche Bank is willing to discuss it on the record. Calls to Wang Laboratories Inc. were unavailing. It is known that Deutsche Bank and DBCC have a variety of mid- and back-office applications, as well as market data services such as Shark running on Wang hardware, including five Wang 7310 hosts.

Deutsche Bank wants to make these applications available to its traders without incurring the expense of dedicated terminal emulation for all 171 trading workstations.

Not all of Deutsche Bank's Wang applications are designed to work within the interactive environment of a typical trading system. Traders wishing to enter, leave and re-enter applications in rapid succession through contended terminal emulation ports may have difficulty re-establishing contact with the same logical ports they just left.

The issue is how can Deutsche Bank traders be given this freedom of movement and access without incurring the cost of 171 dedicated terminal emulations? Rich and Micrognosis are among the finalists vying to provide Deutschebank with answers to this and other pressing questions. Neither Wang Labs, nor Wang Financial Information Services Corp. were respondents to the RFP.