Wiener Börse Revamps Data Web Site

Austrian exchange Wiener Börse last month rolled out a new version of its real-time market data Web site, which adds new features such as streaming data and market depth, as a result of growing numbers of subscribers, including a small but growing number of professional users.

The new market data component of the exchange's Web site, dubbed Wiener Börse Live, is now hosted and operated by Interactive Data's Managed Solutions division—the former IS.Teledata business, which Interactive Data acquired just over a year ago (IMD, Nov. 14, 2005).

IDMS takes data from the exchange onto the vendor's data backbone and combines it with reference data from Interactive Data, then displays it in the applications that act as the front-end interface for Web users, according to Stephan Wolf, chairman of IDMS's executive board.

Users log into the exchange's Web site and are seamlessly redirected to pages hosted by IDMS, which also includes an entitlement system to ensure that only those with the appropriate levels of permission can view data. The cost for private users to access the site is E9 for three months, or E30 for a full year, compared with E135 and E520 for professional users.

IDMS replaces an unidentified local provider, whose offering was coming under the strain of dealing with increased user numbers, officials say.

"By the beginning of this year, Wiener Börse Live had 600 users, and we were seeing performance problems, so we took the opportunity to invest in new technology," says Ludwig Niessen, head of Wiener Börse's IT department. "Response times were slow, and the system's stability was not as I would have wanted… We felt it was necessary to look for a partner with larger-scale systems."

As a result, the site will be able to cope with increased user numbers projected by Wiener Börse, as well as making it possible for the exchange to add more valuable data to the site. For example, the new site features streaming market data, whereas the previous version only used "pull" technologies that needed to be refreshed manually by users—though this technology has been retained to provide delayed data for free to all visitors to the exchange's Web site.

The new version also provides market depth showing the five best bid-and-offer prices, as well as market status qualifiers that describe the state of trading in an instrument—for example, whether a stock is in auction phase or continuous trading, Niessen says. Wiener Börse has also begun using the site to disseminate company reports that include company profiles and financial reports, as well as news on listed Austrian companies from Austria Presse Agentur, the Austrian press agency.

Typically, users of the site would be Austrian investors managing their portfolios and trading securities online, but Niessen says that the new version "is so powerful that some banks have started to use it as a backup for other solutions." This take-up is currently limited to financial advisers, but could expand to portfolio managers, he says.