Reuters Appoints World Product Leaders In Real-Time Information, Client Systems, Transactional Services, And Historical Data

Reuters Holdings PLC has appointed four product "czars" -- one in the U.S. and three in the U.K. -- to pull together the company's product strategy on a global basis. Meanwhile, the firm's market data feed strategy continues to unfold with announcements of several changes and enhancements, including an SDS2 real-time spreadsheet and a page-oriented IDN feed.

The new product chieftains are John Parcell for real-time information, Mario Rosi for client systems, John Hull for transactional services, and Peter Benjamin for historical data. Parcell and Hull report to Reuters North America president Andre Villeneuve, while Rosi reports to Reuters Europe head David Ure and Benjamin reports directly to Reuters managing director and chief executive Glen Renfrew.

Reports vary on how much authority the world product leaders have, and on how much of a challenge the new group represents to the traditional regional management structure at Reuters. The four -- together with Villeneuve in his role as international marketing chief and Patrick Mannix, head technologist -- constitute the international product planning committee, which is thought to have considerable leverage. But one never knows. "In Reuters you have the authority but you can't make them do what you say," says a source close to the committee.

Meanwhile, Reuters made several announcements related to its market data feeds. Fidelity Investments became the first publicly- acknowledged customer for the 56 kilobits/second Marketfeed 2000, an SDS2 real-time spreadsheet was introduced, a page-oriented IDN feed was promised, and the price of the RTDF page service was increased.

Fidelity, one of the original seven beta sites for Marketfeed 2000, has now become a production customer. The firm plans to link its 40 branches and about 80 correspondents to a fault-tolerant Stratus host supporting seven proprietary databases constructed from the Reuter feed. The only other known revenue customer for the feed is Morgan Stanley (MTR, January 1988).

Plans for further development of the feed were outlined by Reuters vice president Bill Cline at last month's Information Industry Association meeting. Reuters plans to add Newssearch -- its answer to Dow Jones 90-day retrieval -- to the feed, presumably for remote databasing. It will be mid-1989 before contributed data from the Reuter Monitor service becomes available in digital form via the Integrated Data Network, says Cline.

In the meantime, Reuters does have plans to introduce a 9600 bits/second page-oriented IDN broadcast feed of selected Monitor pages. This feed, says Cline, would eventually replace the Real Time Datafeed, which broadcasts small user-selected subsets of Monitor pages to trading rooms. Perhaps in anticipation, Reuters raised the price of RTDF from $1,500 to $3,000/month for a five-page system and from $5,000 to $7,500/month for a 32-page system.

Prices also went up for the SDS2 PC Marketfeed, a 9600 bits/ second digital service created in the MS703 controller from the 19.2 kilobit SDS2 page feed. Energy, Futures, and Metals jumped from $175 to $275/month while Money and Corporate Bonds went from $175 to $340.

The Reuter Spreadsheet Link is the third product to use the SDS2 Marketfeed, the others being Marketview Software's Marketview and Roberts-Slade's Master Chartist. The Spreadsheet Link is a product of Ft. Lee, NJ-based Raid Software, Inc. The Link, which runs on an IBM AT, allows data elements to be extracted from SDS2 pages, named, and inserted into a spreadsheet, where they update in real time. The PC can also be used to display native SDS2 pages, except for news.