Reuters' Tablets Dissolve In 3000 Environment

While Reuters is sorting out recently reported Triarch 2000 problems (Dealing With Technology, May 30), the company will also have to help London customers who continue to have trouble using the Tablet applications of the 3000 Series, sources say (TST, November 25, 1996). Reuters officials confirm that the Tablet applications of the 3000 Series services cannot be run in unison.

Tablet applications display the historical and fundamental data from Reuters' Reference Database (RDB) and come in three versions: the Reuters 3000 Money Application; the Reuters 3000 Application for Fixed Income (known as R3FI); and the Reuters Equities Application. They form an integral part of the flagship 3000 Series of products.

The crux of the problem is the contention between 16-bit display applications running against the 32-bit Windows NT environment of the 3000 Series Tablet applications. In the past, Reuters has demonstrated that 16-bit applications can run drag-and-drop functions under a 32-bit architecture.

However, even with Reuters' Markets 3000, a combination of all three relevant data feeds, only one Tablet application can be installed at a time, customers say. TST's counterpart newsletter in London, Dealing With Technology, learned in late May of a number of sites that have installed two or more Tablet applica tions, and have suffered all sorts of incompatibil ity problems.

Reuters acknowledges the Tablet problem, confirms David Anderson, a Reuters marketing manager in the Open Systems Group. He says the use of multiple Tablets is "currently not a supported option, [as there are] some incompatibilities between the different applications."

Reuters' desktop integration problems may eventually be solved by Reuters Application Environment (RACE), a Microsoft OLE-based software development environment that is the cornerstone of Reuters' front-end strategy.

RACE is intended to help users run, for example, the Reuters Terminal Workstation (RTW) application and a Tablet application on their PCs. The RTW program displays real-time data while the Tablet provides historic data. If users are watching the ticker page via the RTW and notice that Reuters' share price is dropping dramatically, they can quickly discover what the lowest Reuters price has been in the last 12 months by accessing the historic information from the RDB, via the Tablet application.

RACE allows users to bypass having to find the Tablet application on their own, run it, and enter the proper code for Reuters, among other chores. RACE lets users to point to the Reuters symbol in the RTW application, right-click the mouse, and then select the necessary information. RACE allows these different applications to communicate with one another, which is a step beyond drag-and-drop capabilities.

Reuters has made a tacit commitment to merging various display applications, and the company is likely to integrate its desktop strategy by working toward unifying the RTW, the Personal Trader Workstation (PTW) and the Tablet applications.

"Our clients are telling us that they would like to see a much more integrated desktop," Anderson says. "We are working as best we can to move that forward, but we always have to take into account that we have a legacy of systems, and need to forge a balance between the two situations. Developments in the future will be borne out of the best of the Tablets, the PTW/RTW, and Kobra."