Dow Jones To Offer Consolidated News Feed; End-Users Will Keep 90-Day Retrieval As Local Database

Dow Jones and Co. is readying a high-speed consolidated feed of all its news wires and products. One result will eventually be the ability of end-users to maintain the Dow Jones 90-Day News Retrieval database on a local host or network server.

Dow Jones officials won't comment on the new feed, but sources there and elsewhere confirm the company's plans. "You know parts of things that make some sense," Richard Levine, vice president at Dow Jones Information Services, tells us. "Some parts might not be absolutely right." Several quote vendors confirm privately that they've been briefed on the Dow Jones plan.

The consolidated feed is expected to include the Broadtape, Capital Markets Report, Professional Investor Report, 90-Day News, and the NYSE and Amex tickers. At 9600 bits/second, there would be plenty of room left over for new Dow Jones products or, conceivably, third- party information. The feed will be processed by a brand new Tandem host. The timetable for roll-out isn't known, but vendors have been promised feed specs within the next few weeks and the product could be in the field by the third quarter.

Ten quote vendors currently redistribute one or more Dow Jones news products. One benefit of the new system, says a Dow Jones source who asks not to be identified, will be the ability to tailor feeds for different vendors. The Tandem will broadcast "on an individual basis, vendor by vendor, what they can handle," says the source.

But the most remarkable result will be the evolution of 90-Day News Retrieval toward a distributed database architecture. Instead of storing the database at a quote vendor's data center, it will be pushed out to customer locations in multiple copies. The entire 90- Day database requires about 50-70 megabytes of storage, a slam dunk for a LAN file server or branch minicomputer.

"We're simply changing the technology in the interface from ourselves to the vendors, and also to the brokerage houses, where as many as possible can accept any and all of our news products in a broadcast mode," says our Dow Jones source. "As we look to the future, we'll probably be doing the same kinds of things with Fortune 500 customers."

The quote vendors that stand to benefit most are those already committed to a broadcast architecture for market data distribution, particularly S&P Trading Systems and PC Quote. Officials at both Šcompanies decline to discuss the Dow Jones plan, as does Telerate's CMQ Communications unit, which is expected to be a test bed for the LAN implementation of the new feed. Another beneficiary is likely to be Reuters, which needs Dow Jones news for its equities products, but has found securing access to be a tricky business (MTR, February 1988).

Among the unanswered questions related to the feed are these: (1) Does the higher bandwidth mean Dow Jones will modify its long- standing policy that everyone get the news at exactly the same time? (2) Will Dow Jones get into the terminal and applications software business, perhaps providing something like a First Call system for processing the 90-Day feed at the user site? (3) Will Dow Jones open the feed to third-party content, such as analysts' morning meeting notes or SEC filings?