Two Years After Data Logic Purchase, Dec TRS Comes Home To Roost At Desisco

Digital Equipment Corp. has restructured its trading room systems development group, eliminating a number of platform- engineer positions from its Marlborough, Mass.-based operation and consolidating trading room systems development at its Ickenham plant, near London. At a time when Digital has initiated cutbacks corporationwide, the TRS move is aimed in part at containing costs.

The centralization represents the latest, and perhaps last, fallout from DEC's purchase two years ago of Data Logic Ltd.'s financial markets group, and its subsequent establishment of Digital Equipment Services Industry Solutions Co., also known as Desisco. Since its inception, the operating unit has played an increasingly central role in DEC's trading room systems development plans.

According to Norman Goldberg, vice president of DEC's banking/investments business unit, trading room systems development was shifted to Ickenham because that was where DECtrade Desktop product development has taken place, under the auspices of Desisco. DECtrade Desktop is the vendor's new trader workstation software, and the lead product in its newly configured DECtrade family of trading software solutions (TST, Sept. 8).

At a time when DEC's most urgent trading room systems challenge was to integrate -- from both marketing and technological perspectives -- all its TRS products, developers were split. While DECtrade Desktop staff were in Ickenham, DECtrade data distribution platform staff were in Marlborough.

DEC officials now say that the consolidation of developers in Ickenham may help solve some of the remaining technological inconsistencies among the various elements of DECtrade.

The split was inconvenient and costly. Says Goldberg: "We had engineers that were constantly on airplanes across the ocean. The amount of time we lost in traveling alone was substantial."

Goldberg says remaining TRS development staff in Marlborough, and some also in New York, will now be devoted primarily to working with customers and third-party vendors, writing ports for applications to run on DEC platforms. He declines to provide head counts.

In the context of clarifying the consolidation of trading systems forces in the U.K., DEC announced a series of new contracts to install trading room systems -- all three of which are European sites: Ciba-Geigy AG in Switzerland; Bacob S.A. in Belgium; and Scottish Amicable in the U.K.

However, while the wins are surely good news for DEC, their uniformly European aspect -- combined with the shift to Ickenham -- necessarily raises the question of whether DEC's efforts to sell trading room systems in the U.S. are lagging behind.

Says Goldberg: "Data Logic, then Desisco, then Digital -- however you want to call it -- has been better positioned because of people in place, long-term relationships, that have this business moving the way it is in Europe. I think we're driving to change that [in the U.S.]."

The changes in the trading room systems organization come as DEC stands on the verge of implementing a corporationwide reorganization and downsizing plan under the leadership of its new president Robert Palmer.

Late last week, Palmer announced plans to do away with redundant and competing engineering and business units. However, Goldberg denies that DEC's actions vis a vis its trading room systems staff are related to corporationwide changes. Rather, he says they were based on the best interests of trading room customers and the fact that TRS operations weren't as efficient as they should be.

Still, Goldberg makes it clear that the new chief is very much in the picture. Says Goldberg: "I just left a session with Bob Palmer and the message that he's passing out is cost- containment." That goal is seconded by several other senior DEC trading room systems executives.

Goldberg stresses that there have been no layoffs at Marlborough. "Any people who are without jobs, we are actively working with to place within Digital." He declines "to get into specific numbers" as to how many staff are being reassigned, and says that Marlborough staff levels are, at any rate, not settled yet. Other DEC officials put the number of redeployed staff at about half a dozen.

Though DEC's trading room systems' corporate report chart has already undergone some reshuffling, Goldberg says there's more to come. "Report lines are all going to change," he says, under the new management's corporationwide restructuring plans, the first wave of which hit last week. For the time being, the banking/investments business unit remains under the global oversight of Goldberg, who remains based in Marlborough. However, over the past few months, Peter Shelton -- an 18-year DEC veteran who became managing director of Desisco at its founding -- has emerged as the manager of the trading room systems business worldwide.

Shelton says he currently reports to Goldberg as well as to DEC's vice president of financial services enterprise for Europe, Per-Olof Loof. Meanwhile, under Shelton is Geoff Bowden, manager of engineering for DEC trading systems worldwide.

The marketing lineup is less settled. DEC has still found no replacement for Stephen Davis, formerly marketing manager of trading and exchanges in the banking/investments business unit, under Goldberg. "I'm actively looking, though," he says.

Goldberg says Davis has not yet been reassigned, but "is in the process of looking within Digital for opportunities." Davis left his position in June.

Meanwhile, Peter Morris heads up European sales and marketing of trading specific products, reporting to Shelton. Reporting to Morris is Vincent O'Kelly, European marketing manager. Until recently, O'Kelly was part of a distinct European marketing group which has lately been disbanded and redeployed. That group had been headed by Tom Richards, who now heads the international banking marketing group for Europe.

According to Shelton, the top-priority development project for the TRS group at Ickenham is rendering interchangeable the various VAX/VMS- and UNIX-based components of Digital's trading room systems.

Currently, there are two versions of the DECtrade data distribution platform: the DEC-developed NWay and the TCP/IP- based platform that was built on Data Logic's technology.

NWay provides a reliable-broadcast communications facility between VAX/VMS servers and UNIX- or VAX/VMS-based workstations. The TCP/IP platform provides point-to-point communications from UNIX servers to UNIX workstations.

DEC also markets a Microsoft Corp. Windows-based version of Desktop that communicates with UNIX servers via Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange.

Both data distribution platforms now share the same API, which allows them to provide communications to the same set of applications, including DECtrade Desktop workstation software. However, it has not been possible for users desiring the functionality of the NWay reliable-broadcast protocol to make use of UNIX-based servers.

Shelton says DEC developers in Ickenham are now in the process of solving this problem, aiming to let a mix of UNIX and VAX/VMS servers and workstations interact across either version of DECtrade. Their goal is to build a reliable broadcast mechanism using User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a protocol associated with TCP/IP.

Of course, the likelihood that DEC will persist in giving all of these products and developments the same trade name may make it hard to communicate, reliably, to customers the fact that the worst of the vendor's UNIX woes are behind it.

And speaking of confusing names, DEC sources say that Digital has already begun to consider changing Desisco's name to something that is more descriptive of what the unit does and how it relates to Digital. Though Goldberg says that DEC has no plans on the table to change Desisco's name, he concedes there has been a problem.

"What people know as Desisco isn't an anomaly within Digital," says Goldberg. "There is some confusion and we need to take some steps to clarify that."