To Add IBM-PC Compatibility, Broadcast Quote Stream

Bunker Ramo Information Systems will adapt its broker network to accommodate IBM-PCs, and plans to add an expanded, satellite based broadcast quote stream. Both moves are part of its new "Supernet" telecommunications strategy for remaining competitive in the white-hot quotations/brokerage automation business.

"The base of our office automation system [is] the IBM-PC family," says Michael Cooper, vice president, sales and marketing. "By utilizing an IBM-based product, we're able to not only make our offerings of applications software available, out also open up the door to all the different application packages that are out there." Bunker plans to focus on three members of the IBM family -- the plain vanilla PC, the PC-XT, and the PC-AT -- but will avoid the 3270 PC that is to be the mainstay of the proposed Imnet system (see related story, this issue). Supernet's office automation protocol will be based on IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA), Cooper says.

Bunker's idea, apparently, is that if it can provide flexible, low-cost telecommunications and data access, then customer hardware and software will take care of themselves. As a result, the company is promoting an "open architecture" philosophy -- snaking available hardware and software specs so that third-party equipment and programs can be accommodated with a minimum of fuss. For example, Bunker will promote its own "Topbroker" brokerage support package, says Cooper, but "if one of our users wanted the Reveal package, we would make available the -information necessary [so] that Reveal could become integrated into the system."

Bunker will soon join the long parade of quote vendors using George Erickson, director of brokerage engineering. The broadcast quote stream will be delivered directly to customer offices for display on PC workstations, as well as to Bunker's regional data centers for retrieval over landlines by traditional dumb terminals. "The old and the new will coexist," says Erickson.

With a planned expansion of its ticker plant, Bunker intends to augment its quote stream with more European information and data on fixed income/municipal markets, says Cooper. The satellite channel will operate at 19.2 kilobits/second, which "should take care of just about all the data," says Erickson.

The first new capability under the Supernet umbrella is called "Superlink," which "overlays the current network with a Tandem backbone communications network," and allows a customer to use existing Bunker phone lines to access its own host mainframe or

service bureau, or third-party databases. Existing customers will save money, Cooper contends, because they will no longer need two networks -- one for quotes and a second for internal communications. He eventual1y' foresees "thousands of terminals talking to hundreds of computers" over the network, with customers able to maintain a mix of PCs and dumb terminals, such as Bunker's 7/90.

The timetable calls for the Supernet strategy to be implemented by late 1986-eary 1987;" says Cooper. Bunker will have several existing 7/90 customers taking the first step with Superlink by the end of the 1985.