Telerate Absorbs CMQ Communications, Adapts Technology To New Data Feed Strategy (Another High-Speed Consolidated Feed)

The market data services of Telerate Systems, Inc. and its recent acquisition, CMQ Communications, Inc., are expected to be merged and integrated by year's end. One result will be a high-speed consolidated feed combining CMQ exchange data and Telerate contributed data, a product that will go head-to-head with the 56 kilobits/second Marketfeed 2000 product being introduced by Reuters Holdings PLC (MTR, January 1988).

As we go to press, meanwhile, CMQ is about to lose most of its identity. Beginning March 1st, all CMQ products will be sold under the Telerate Systems name in the U.S. -- and everywhere else in the world except Canada, where the firm has a large installed base of retail brokerage customers.

Since the acquisition last fall (MTR, November 1988), Telerate and CMQ systems people have been working furiously to design a new data feed strategy for Telerate, which is plagued by a plethora of protocols and feeds -- in essence a separate, unique network for just about every product. The diagram above shows the current Telerate setup.

The interactive, page-based Standard Telerate Protocol (STP) supports the vast majority of Telerate customers who receive the firm's flagship service. This network also connects to CMQ's Multiport terminals, which are able to display both Telerate pages and exchange data delivered via CMQ's interactive Autoquote line.

The broadcast, page-based Standard Output Protocol (SOP) supports client page servers in high-density applications like trading rooms. The page-based Sideband Service comprises a small set of 40-byte pages designed for reception on the PDQ hand-held receiver or on a client PC. The page-based Broadcast Service provides a subset of the standard Telerate service for client PC reception.

The Broadcast Service also carries a series of 128-byte hex pages designed to support the PC-based Teletrac analytic product. The only true elementized, record-oriented broadcast feed currently offered by Telerate is that recently introduced to support the Tactician product. The feed contains about 2,500 data items, of which 1,000 are futures.

By the end of 1988, however, the landscape of the figure above is expected to emerge. Teletrac will be converted to run on the 9600 bits/second record-oriented feed, thus eliminating the kludgy hex pages. The much-anticipated Lotus/Telerate product will use the same feed.

But direct reception of this feed will be limited to PC-based Telerate products, according to Gerald Mintz, CMQ marketing director. Clients wishing to cache logical Telerate data on a host server will have to receive it via CMQ's consolidated feed, a dual 19.2 kilobits/second service which includes all North American exchange data and will be expanded to include overseas exchanges as well. Price box clients will be able to receive subsets of the feed, such as North American equities or Telerate forex quotes.

Also in the works near-term is a Telerate emulator card for PCs that will allow hot-key access to STP pages on a personal computer or via a LAN server.