Pru-Bache Signs For $27.8 Million Worth Of Equities 2000 As Reuters Gets Foothold In U.S. Stock Quote Business

With new customers for two of its newest products, Reuters Holdings PLC has established its foothold in the North American equities information market. As part of a worldwide agreement, Prudential- Bache Securities, Inc. will install 400 Equities 2000 terminals in New York. Separately, Morgan Stanley and Co., Inc. has become the first production customer for the 56 kilobits/second Reuter Marketfeed 2000.

The four-year, $27.8 million Pru-Bache deal will replace 650 existing Reuter Quotation Retrieval Service terminals with Equities 2000s at 36 Pru-Bache offices in Europe and Asia. The New York headquarters installations will be new, and represent the first significant U.S. brokerage order for the product.

The Reuter devices will replace an assortment of standalone dumb terminals, including ADP FS-Ones and "some Quotrons of the same ilk," says Bill Rush, senior vice president, communications. Rush stresses that the order doesn't affect Pru-Bache's ADP-supplied retail branch system, only odd lot terminals in places like operations and a few trading desks.

How can Pru-Bache afford to swap older and relatively cheaper terminals for newer and pricier Equities 2000s? "We got some very attractive pricing," says Rush.

Traders and staffers won't be force-fed the Reuter service, but will have an opportunity to use old and new side by side and make up their own minds. "We're not going to go in and say 'Here's your Reuters terminal, guy. Take it or stuff it,'" says Rush.

Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, began receiving live Marketfeed 2000 data just before the end of the year and is "relatively pleased," although "we don't have any production stuff on it yet," says Keith Iverson. He declines to discuss Morgan Stanley's applications plans, saying only that the firm was "looking for a consolidated feed with international data on it."

Morgan is processing the feed using a Sun 3 workstation, which currently maintains a live database of North American equities, says Iverson. The upcoming release 4 of Sun's operating system will allow the database to be expanded.