Reuters to Begin Testing 3000 Series; Securities 3000 is Result of Armstrong

The first products to result from Reuters' Armstrong project will begin in-house testing during this quarter and will start to appear in customer tests by the early summer. The vendor is upgrading its existing Securities 2000 and Treasury 2000 information service to include data taken from the Reference Database (RDB) developed as part of Armstrong and will be designating the new versions as 3000 series services.

Initial details of the Securities 3000 service appear in the latest issue of Reuters World, one of the vendor's in-house staff magazines. A spokesman declines to give further details of the service or related issues. The article was written by Michael Tarlinton, Securities 3000 product manager. Tarlinton could not be reached for comment or further details.

The Armstrong project was begun some 18 months ago with the aim of consolidating the vendor's disparate databases, along with those it has acquired such as the IP Sharp and Capital Market Decisions (CMD) databases (D&IS, 3 July, 1995).

Reuters has already established data collection centres at Tiverton in the U.K. and in Singapore, along with a massively-parallel database engine supplied by AT&T's NCR subsidiary that is now known as the RDB (Dealing with Technology, December 17, 1993).

According to a separate article in Reuters World, the initial focus of Armstrong has been to provide the interfaces to existing databases and "the infrastructure to actually support a product" such as customer permissioning mechanisms. During 1996, work will continue to integrate the IP Sharp and CMD databases into the RDB.

Both these databases -- particularly the CMD one -- cover the fixed income markets, a key area for Reuters as it seeks to claw back ground lost to Bloomberg in the fixed-income market. But the first 3000 series products will cover the equities area, enhancing the vendor's ability to provide historical and fundamental data alongside real-time prices.

In his article, Tarlinton says that Securities 3000 will integrate the existing real-time data from Reuters' Integrated Data Network (IDN) that is available in the Securities 2000 service with historical and fundamental data from the RDB. Among this data will be company reports, action histories and forecast information, along with price histories and cross reference data, all of which is housed on the RDB.

The 3000 service will also include the ReuterMail messaging service, which some observers see as a further move against Bloomberg, whose service incorporates an e-mail system that has proved popular with users.

Beta testing, which a Reuters source says will begin "by the early summer," will initially be on the Networked Reuter Terminal (NRT). Connection to the RDB and ReuterMail will be via the recently introduced SessionServer product, which is connected to the High Performance Shared Network (HSPN) rather than the IDN (DWT, December 15, 1995). Delivery to standalone RTs and PC and Unix workstations on the Triarch digital data distribution system will follow "soon after."

Reuters is also to provide interfaces to allow the service to be distributed by other digital data distribution systems. Importantly, the 3000 series services will feature an application programming interface (API), known as the Open Access Interface (OAI), to allow RDB data to be used in users' own analytics and applications.

At the end of this month, the company will begin training personnel in its front line business units (FLBUs). The first FLBUs to roll out the service will be Southeast Asia, U.K. & Ireland (UKI), Reuters America, France Switzerland and Germany. In each of these, Reuters has "implementation teams" preparing for the roll out. Following the introduction of the service in these areas, the service will be rolled out in East Asia, Japan, Benelux, Italy and Scandinavia.

In the initial roll-out -- known internally as the "Baseline" phase -- the company is concentrating on providing "a defined set of data, functionality and delivery platforms," Tarlinton's article says. Once into the beta test phase the priorities will be to add more data, functionality and platform options. Included in Reuters' plans for the expanded data coverage are greater geographic and historical coverage of corporate actions, more instrument types, including equity derivatives, and more third-party feeds for consensus and earnings estimates.

One feature of Securities 3000 that some users have already been involved in the testing of is the display software that will be used for fundamental data. Called Tablet during its development, this is a Microsoft Windows application that runs on the RT and its variants and was being tested by Reuters' London Usability Labs at the end of 1994.

Tablet is fully integrated with the real-time data screens and is understood to feature the ability to link between real-time and RDB data using the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) functions of Windows.

According to one source at Reuters, 3000 series versions of Reuters' other information services will follow throughout the year. The first of these will be Treasury 3000, which is expected to be rolled out in a similar timeframe to Securities 3000 and will provide a similar linking between real-time and historical data. Treasury 2000 combines foreign exchange and money market data with debt instrument coverage.