IMD Award Winners Repeat Past Success

Bloomberg took home the most awards at the Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards ceremony held on Tuesday, May 22-including the coveted award for overall Best Data Provider (Vendor) -- though smaller vendors serving specific the over-the-counter pricing and analysis markets also took notable wins, reflecting niche expertise.

The vendor has now won the best overall provider award 10 years in a row-every year since the awards' inception-and also won the Best Data Provider for Equities and Best Data Provider for Fixed Income categories (both for the sixth year in a row), as well as Best News Provider.

In the other asset class-specific award categories, Thomson Reuters won Best Data Provider for Foreign Exchange, as well as the Best Low-Latency Data or Technology Vendor category-both of which the vendor has won for six years in a row. And in the related Best Data Networking and Infrastructure Provider category, BT won the award for the second year in succession.

Meanwhile, SuperDerivatives won the Best Data Provider for Derivatives category for the second year in a row, following a three-year winning streak by Markit -- which won the Best Evaluated Prices Service Provider and Best Reference Data Provider awards in the Inside Reference Data categories -- after SuperDerivatives' initial success in 2007. SuperDerivatives also won the Best New Data Product award for its DataX Feed of implied values for multiple asset classes, and was honored separately on the night when chief executive David Gershon was announced as this year's inductee into the Inside Market Data Hall of Fame.

Previous Hall of Fame inductee Tom Jordan's consulting firm Jordan & Jordan won the Best Supporting Services category, which it also won in 2010, while The Roberts Group won Contract Win of the Year for Loomis Sayles & Co.'s deployment of its FITS system last year to manage the firm's market data inventory.

McGraw-Hill won the award for Acquisition of the Year for its purchase of the Dow Jones Indexes business in a joint venture with CME Group -- which won the same award last year for its own acquisition of a 90 percent stake in the DJI business. McGraw-Hill's S&P Capital IQ business also won the Best Analytics Provider award for the third year in a row for its Compustat product, while FactSet Research Systems consolidated last year's success in the Best Research Provider category with another win.

Beyond traditional data vendors, Tullett Prebon Information won the Best Data Provider (Broker) award for the second year in a row, while CME Group narrowly won Best Data Provider (Exchange) -- repeating its 2008 victory-beating the London Stock Exchange, which received a "highly commended" award for its strong showing. The LSE also won one of the call-for-entry categories -- Best Real-Time Market Data Initiative (Vendor) -- for the introduction of its global real-time enterprise usage agreement, which the judging panel praised as the first example of multi-vendor netting for a direct exchange contract, and said should be an industry standard.

The other call-for-entry category -- Most Innovative Market Data Project (Vendor) -- was won by fixed income pricing startup Benchmark Solutions, whose algorithms for capturing data and pricing securities in real time were described by the judges as "the future of pricing for fixed income."