Ex-Reuters Techies Start Firm To Market Lan For SDS2 Marketfeed

A new company headed by former members of the Reuters SDS2 development team has begun marketing a LAN implementation of the SDS2 Marketfeed service. The effort is a joint venture between the new firm, Datacode Inc. of Port Jefferson, NY, and Portland, OR-based Benj. Franklin Federal Savings and Loan, which developed the original LAN software.

Datacode is headed by Alan Christopherson, who developed the Marketfeed service and until recently worked at a Reuters technical center on Long Island. "It's one of those things where you see the niche and you try to go to fill it," says Joseph Urso, Datacode executive vice president. Christopherson's familiarity with the SDS2 client base led him to conclude that significant demand for a LAN product exists, says Urso.

The Benj. Franklin application, now known as Netfeed, isn't a real- time system, says Urso, but an upgraded version, known as RT-Netfeed, is. Netfeed caches SDS2 pages and allows users to retrieve them from the cache, but provides no automatic update capability. RT-Netfeed supports automatic updates of up to 16 pages per workstation, composite paging, multiple pages per screen, and will eventually support analytics, he says.

Reuters has taken no official position on either version of Netfeed. "We have looked at this thing and there may be some reason, in fact there may be some good reason, at a certain point to get involved with and support it but that is a long way from happening," says Reuters spokesperson Bob Crooke. "It has not be quality tested" as have other SDS2 Marketfeed products like Marketview or Roberts- Slade, Inc.'s Chartist.

Crooke is particularly adamant, however, that a per-keystation price being touted by Datacode is "a kind of anomaly." It is true that Benj. Franklin is paying Reuters only $50/terminal/month for access to SDS2 data, but "you can be sure that other customers will pay a lot more than $50/month, which is, shall we say, a pre- development price that one customer is lucky to be still paying." Nonetheless, says Urso, "the total cost is well below what Reuters charges per keystation."

Marketfeed is an optional 9600 bits/second digital output from the SDS2 controller. Each controller supports up to five Reuter keystations and one Marketfeed. Until Netfeed, users wanting to deliver Marketfeed to more than one device had to buy a separate controller for each device.

The RT-Netfeed system redistributes the SDS2 data on the LAN in Marketfeed format, so that third-party and user applications already written for Marketfeed will run with little or no modification. "We're planning on going on it with [Christopherson] and we'll probably be one of the first applications on there," says Hal Roberts, president of Roberts-Slade.

Netfeed runs on any Netbios-compatible LAN, says Urso, and requires a 80286 machine with three megabytes of RAM as a server. One server can support up to 32 workstations. The display software, called Worldwatch, divides the screen into four zones, each of which can display and scroll a standard SDS2 page or one of 25 user-defined composite pages. Each composite page can carry up to 100 different items from other pages. The system also saves a week's worth of news stories on hard disk for headline search and recall.