Micrognosis Sets Development And Marketing Strategies

A strategic marketing and product development plan is beginning to take shape at Micrognosis Inc. after years of passivity. Insiders say the installation of Henry "Hank" White in the driver's seat last year by new owners CSK Corp. has given the company a long-overdue kick in the pants.

Micrognosis has spent the last year forging strategic relationships. Last month, it announced a marketing and development agreement with Ireland's Quay Financial Software Ltd., developer of the InVision local data distribution system and the TeleCalc foreign exchange decision support system. Micrognosis is now talking to others.

At the same time, after several years of near silence there have been rumblings in the new product department. Micrognosis last fall announced a number of enhancements to its TradeLook local data distribution platform and unveiled the Micrognosis Ticker Plant.

Last year, it added a logical data feed handling capability to TradeLook. The addition finally relieves Micrognosis of the distinction of being the only major systems integrator on the Street without record-based feed-handling capability. If it's not too little too late, it may also go some way toward convincing the market that Micrognosis is more than a mere provider of video-switches.

All this activity could help put Micrognosis back on track after years of aimlessness. Uncertainty surrounding its sale to CSK by Control Data Corp. didn't help any. And the company has taken several years to recover from the massive J.P. Morgan & Co. project at 60 Wall Street in New York. Begun in 1987, the project stretched the resources of Micrognosis, then a small software firm and video-switch vendor.

Observers say that since then Micrognosis, in its product development efforts, has responded to the requirements of customers rather than follow a marketing plan of its own. After engaging her on a consultancy basis during the first half of last year, White named Sharon Gregory to the post of vice president of marketing last July. Significantly, the post had been vacant since the departure of James Williams a year earlier.

Gregory says the restructuring Micrognosis instituted last fall is now complete. Net gainers in the reallocation of resources, she says, have been Micrognosis' sales and marketing groups. Development, meanwhile, will be supplemented by relationships with third parties, which are being evaluated by Gregory, White, new hire Gary Handler and Joe Summers.

The QFS deal gives Micrognosis access to a solid product line. Under the agreement, which runs for at least three years, Micrognosis will have exclusive global distribution rights to QFS's InVision and TeleCalc, although QFS will market its own and Micrognosis' products in Ireland.

InVision is a local data distribution system that runs on DOS- or OS/2-based microprocessors. The system is installed at the New York offices of Euro Brokers Inc. (TST, Sept. 10, 1990). QFS recently ported InVision to run with Apple Computers Inc. Macintosh II computers. According to Gregory, InVision initially will be marketed alongside TradeLook. Later, Micrognosis plans to meld the two together. QFS will continue to have responsibility for development of InVision and TeleCalc. Sources say QFS has already received development dollars from Micrognosis, and is guaranteed a revenue stream.

InVision will expand Micrognosis' digital data distribution offerings to include a wider range of hardware and operating system platforms. But perhaps more strategic is the addition of QFS's TeleCalc. TeleCalc is a foreign exchange decision support system that has been critically acclaimed by its users. Its addition to the Micrognosis product line is a signal of that company's new strategy of moving toward end- user applications.

That strategy will take the form of development of new applications and of supporting existing industry favorites. TeleCalc will be written to Micrognosis' UNIX and VAX/VMS workstation platform and continue to be supported by the various incarnations of InVision. It's been suggested that the TeleCalc software be modified to apply to other market instruments, such as equities; a capital markets version is in beta test.

At the same time, Micrognosis is seeking relationships with other third-party application vendors. It recently signed a deal to distribute Cambridge, Mass.-based Leading Market Technologies Inc.'s graphics software, which provides a toolkit allowing users to build their own applications. TradeLook already supports spreadsheet software from Lotus Development Corp.

Other relationships have already borne fruit. Last fall, Micrognosis announced its Ticker Plant system, which it developed with London-based Intra-City Technology Ltd. (ICT). Gregory declines to comment on the ICT relationship. But sources say the two got together after working in Europe on handling software for Telekurs (North America) Inc.'s Ticker and TDF feeds.

The Micrognosis Ticker Plant is designed to handle such high-speed digital feeds as Reuters Holdings PLC's 56 kilobit/second Marketfeed 2000 as well as proprietary information. According to Gregory, the Ticker Plant software provides the filtering and error correction required for safe handling of such feeds.

But logical data without logical feed-handling software isn't much use. So Micrognosis last year finally added a record-handling capability -- Micrognosis Record Based Information Transport System (or Merit)Ñto its TradeLook platform. The system allows TradeLook to distribute interactive and broadcast record-based feeds as well as page- based feeds, whether they're delivered directly to TradeLook via a dedicated server or handled by the Micrognosis Ticker Plant.

Where the Ticker Plant is in place, once data are received and reformatted, they are published onto Merit, which handles distribution to TradeLook applications. The Ticker Plant can allow the user to consolidate data from multiple sources.

Gregory points to these new products -- and to a new range of platforms for TradeLook -- as evidence that the new business strategy is taking shape. It's too early to measure its results in terms of users.

One installation of InVision and TeleCalc is already in prospect under the new accord. Finacor, a Paris-based money broker, is expected to install the systems at 100 or so positions. Gregory, meanwhile, says Micrognosis itself added between 40 and 50 client sites during 1991. She says the company now has 300 customer sites comprising a total of 17,000 positions.