Morningstar Preps Web Services Expansion; Adds Alerts, History, Depth, News

Chicago-based data and investment research provider Morningstar is expanding its Web Services request-response online data delivery platform -- an alternative to traditional real-time datafeeds for web-based data applications, which enables customers to access data from its global dataset over the internet -- with a new alerting component and broader historical data, market depth and news coverage over the coming year.

The alerting engine, which Morningstar rolled out in the last two months, allows the vendor to trigger alerts based on client-defined parameters for any of the 10 million exchange-traded instruments delivered via the service, and to display these alerts in web-based front-end applications such as browser-based terminals, websites, and online portfolio evaluation portals.

For example, a broker's clients may want to be alerted if the price of a stock increases by a certain percentage, says Barry Woodward, chief operating officer for real-time data at Morningstar.

"We have 114 pre-programmed alerts," Woodward says. "Customers determine the parameters -- which can be any field on our feeds -- and send them to us via their broker. Then we store it with a unique identifier to allow us to identify the client... and when an alert is triggered, we send back the data to the client [via the broker]."

In addition to the alerting system, Morningstar also plans to extend the range of historical data accessible via the service in the next two weeks, from five years of minute and hourly data to 10 years' worth, and from 10 years of daily data to a full daily data service with prices dating back to the early 1950s for some instruments, after seeing customer demand for more data for use in charts and analytics.

Also as a result of customer demand, Morningstar plans to increase the granularity of exchange data it offers via its Web Services -- from only top-of-book data to 10 levels of depth -- and will also introduce a "push" component to the service, which would allow users to generate a ticker feed for front-end web-applications, for example. Although Morningstar already offers depth market and news sources on its binary feed, this is the first time the data will be available via the Web Services delivery mechanism, Woodward says.

The vendor plans to further broaden the content available by adding news to its Web Services, in addition to price data. "At the moment, [Web Services] is all about prices, [but] we are looking to add news from local sources and our primary vendors such as Dow Jones," Woodward says.

Morningstar has yet to finalize a timeline for the new coverage, but expects to have added at least two of datasets to Web Services by year-end. In the meantime, the vendor is looking to improve the performance of the service, which currently receives 30 million requests per day -- double the amount received at the same time one year ago, Woodward says.

Ben Collins, sales director for Morningstar's real-time data business, attributes this increase in demand to the comparative ease of integration and low total cost of ownership of a web-based data delivery service as opposed to a traditional binary feed. "It's easier, faster and cheaper for clients to integrate a web services feed, and still allows our clients to receive a professional level of content and service. We will continue to increase the scope of the content and capability to meet our clients' ever-expanding requirements," he adds.