CITY INSIDER

By the time you read this, your euro-compliant applications will have proven their worth--or not. Let's hope it's the former. But if it isn't, don't despair. There's a batch of friendly consultants happy to help you out of your mess (and, of course, help you with your Y2K plans). You thought MSB/Neon and Logicscope gave you enough of a choice? Think again. Not only are Telerate refugees Tosca (speciality: custom front-end and feedhandler work) and New York/New Jersey Metro Area heavies Marketnet Group (with a searchable database of securities and how the euro will affect them) now eagerly awaiting your call, Insider recently ran into an outfit known as Greenhat, who are equally eager to help on your Tibco project. Check them out at http://www.greenhatconsulting.com. I mean, why not? They're helping JP Morgan.

In case you can't make it through the traditional January detox, consider supporting the arts. Swing by the Art '99 show at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Better yet, call the nice people at Primark's I/B/E/S unit, which is co-sponsoring a champagne preview on January 20--perfect for getting you past that difficult midway stretch. Should be a good bash, especially because co-sponsors also include none other than Bloomberg. If their Andy Warhol party from a year or so ago is anything to go by, this promises to be a scene-and-a-half.

Not to be outdone by other, less capable pundits, Insider is proud to present his own set of predictions for the London market in 1999:

The euro and Y2K will continue to dog progress in important areas of development, forcing many key projects to be put on hold.

Reuters' stranglehold on the platform business will be dislodged as smaller players attack from all directions amid confusion among Reuters sales folks' attempts to sell Tibco products. Smaller, specialist vendors will coordinate their activities, creating a "cottage industry" geared toward offering wider solutions to compete with Reuters.

Middleware will become ubiquitous. But a lack of standards will create the need for generic interfaces between middleware flavours. Back to the drawing board?

Cost pressures will force an evaluation of IT staffing within the user firms. As a result, firms will increasingly seek to outsource core components of their trading room infrastructure. A major opportunity, perhaps, for audacious newcomers and large providers of network services?