Latest McGraw-Hill Reorganization Brings Platt's, S&P Trading Systems Under One Roof

Like the boll weevil, the Standard & Poor's Trading Systems unit at McGraw-Hill, Inc. is still trying to find a home. The latest, much- publicized corporate reorganization at McGraw-Hill has once again shifted reporting responsibility for the nomadic unit to a different part of the company, the second such shift in the past year and the seventh since its predecessor Monchik-Weber Corp. was acquired in 1985.

The latest layover for S&P Trading Systems is in the newly-created Commodity Services Group in the McGraw-Hill Financial Services Co. The Commodity Services Group also contains Platt's Global Alert, McGraw-Hill's other real-time market data service, and several other energy services.

"This combination brings together McGraw-Hill's real-time technology platform and a number of time-critical commodity and financial information services which are distributed through broadcast and network technology," says Financial Services Co. president Terry McGraw in a July 7th memo announcing the new structure.

"What we're looking to do is to evolve a total and complete comprehensive strategy of how McGraw-Hill will bring products into the real-time market, to focus the energies into one organizational element for that purpose," says Michael Hehir, former head of McGraw- Hill's energy market focus and now executive vice president at the Commodity Services Group. "For the real-time markets, we needed to coordinate the financial and the energy, commodities and all these things."

Hehir declines to speculate on the details. "We're still formulating a lot of our direction," he says. "Organizationally we've linked them through my operation but we haven't come up to any real conclusions as to how it's going to eventually be out in the field."

Given chairman Joseph Dionne's recent public emissions about the importance of real-time services, Hehir's group should be the focus of plenty of activity and investment, but many issues remain. Among the open questions are these:

Will Tony Durniak's McGraw-Hill News operation, which still reports to Dionne, be moved in with the other real-time services? Hehir won't comment.

Will Platt's Global Alert be integrated into the S&P headend at the Hightstown, NJ, data center and/or added to the Ticker III feed? Hehir says there's been no decision.

How will responsibility for developing real-time technology platforms be divided between Hehir's group and the corporate-level Information and Technology Resources Dept., which runs the data centers and is headed by newly-named chief technologist Richard Shriver, former president of the now-defunct Information Management Co., which used to house S&P Trading Systems (MTR, February 1987)?

Can S&P Trading Systems unpack its bags? "Quite honestly for my own vested interest I would hope so," says Hehir. "I'd be rather disappointed if it didn't."