First Boston Taps Next, Reuters For System In Tokyo

As First Boston Corp. in New York turns its back on a NeXT Computers Inc.-based system, 40 of the firm's equities traders in Tokyo have been trading warrants, convertibles and indices using a data distribution and analytics platform built there on NeXT workstations, with Sun Microsystems Inc. servers and Reuters Holdings PLC's Source/Sink Library (SSL).

The installation at CS First Boston (Japan) Ltd. is NeXT's largest non-North American trading-room installation, and the only site to use application programming interfaces (APIs) from Reuters' SSL for NeXT machines. NeXT is finding other footholds at First Boston, with a small installation at the firm's Japanese warrants desk in London.

Sprinkled throughout First Boston's equities area in Tokyo, the NeXT workstations tap data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Broker's Broker's warrants service and Reuters' Marketfeed 2000, say sources there. Reuters' feed-handling software resides on Sun servers. Using APIs to Reuters' SSL, First Boston programmers built a suite of proprietary applications for the front and back office, from valuation to position-keeping.

But systems heads in Tokyo have only elected to roll out a portion of the applications built for the NeXT workstations, sources say, suggesting a hesitance in upper management to fully support the system that users at First Boston say they "love."

Says one First Boston technologist: "New York's New York. Japan's Japan, with different budgets. What's done in New York doesn't affect Japan's decisions." Any crisis of faith in NeXT in Tokyo is spurred by First Boston Japan's human- resource considerations, this source says, rather than technological or political ones.

But it was to New York that First Boston Japan looked last year when seeking systems heads for its projects. The firm's Japanese group lured Abraham (Ramy) Goldstein and Hadar Pedhazur, who had designed First Boston New York's now evicted NeXT project (TST, Feb. 10).

But Goldstein and Pedhazur left some two months into the project to found UBS Securities Inc.'s NeXT-based system. Rather than hire a full-time replacement to lead the NeXT charge, First Boston instead engaged a consultant, Tim Reed, who has since left the firm. Reed couldn't be reached for comment. Sources say Reed's departure left only one programmer with NeXT expertise at First Boston in Tokyo.

Remaining at First Boston Japan with responsibility for the project are Gary Sienkiewicz, vice president, and Jim Houck, chief information officer. Houck couldn't be reached. Sienkiewicz, who reports to Houck, didn't return repeated calls seeking comment. Houck and Sienkiewicz are said by sources familiar with the project to lean toward Sun rather than NeXT as a workstation of choice.

But NeXT has held its place at the floor in Tokyo with no major champion for about a year: no small feat, given the notoriously political climate of First Boston's systems groups.

The trickle of NeXT to London came this month, when two NeXTstations were installed at First Boston's Japanese warrants desk there. The system, with communications links to Tokyo, is being used for valuations and other analytics, such as hedges, according to a source at First Boston in London. Data downloads from Tokyo are not yet live, but should follow soon, the source says.

Some say NeXT at First Boston in New York fell victim to a recent mandate to standardize on a single -- and Sunny -- platform, as much as to the lack of NeXT-expect staff following the departure of Goldstein and Pedhazur (TST, June 17, 1991).

Among the dominators of the digital data distribution market in Japan are Oki Data Systems, which is a value-added reseller of Teknekron Software Systems Corp.'s TIB platform, Reuters and Toshiba Corp. Toshiba two weeks ago signed a deal to re-sell Kapiti PLC's Financial Information Systems Toolkit (FIST). Toshiba will use FIST as its data distribution platform, and to support all new applications, as well as Toshiba's existing products.

Following the decision by Salomon Brothers Inc.'s Phibro Energy Inc. to tap Kapiti to distribute market data to some 500 NeXT workstations around the commodities firm worldwide (TST, Sept. 23, 1991), FIST has been retooled to run on NeXT workstations. In addition, sources say Kapiti is building an object layer to run on FIST to exploit NeXT's object- orientation. As a result, each of these three data distribution vendors in Japan now has a NeXT offering.

Meanwhile, Canon Inc. serves as NeXT's sole distributor within Japan, as well as one of its largest financial backers, with an 18 percent stake in the company.