CDC North America Moves From Old TIB To New

NEW YORK--CDC North America, the US subsidiary of Paris-based Caisse des Depots et Consignations (CDC), is making the move from an older version of Tibco's The Information Bus (TIB) to a new environment that includes TIB/Rendezvous (RV) and Microsoft's Windows NT on the front end, says Larry Sherman, the manager of market data services for the CDC group in New York.

The CDC subsidiary is in the middle of an upgrade of its implementation of the TIB in order to achieve Year 2000 compliance, Sherman says. In addition, the approximately eight-year-old TIB digital data distribution platform had reached the end of its life cycle, says Sherman. The current TIB installation "could not accommodate the data needs of CDC's trading staff", he says.

CDC North America officials decline comment upon the number of traders, but an industry source estimates that there are about 40 fixed-income traders in New York.

While investigating whether or not to stay with the TIB, Sherman approached Reuters to learn more about the future of the digital data distribution platform. "We got assurances from (a senior official at) Reuters that there would be a Kobra front end for the TIB," says Sherman. Kobra is Reuters' object-oriented, front-end, display application for its Triarch digital data distribution platform. "I think it's definitely happening," he says.

Such assurances led the CDC subsidiary to stay with Tibco's products and adopt the latest version of Marketsheet for Unix (MSU) and a Y2K-compliant TIB version.

"It looked to us that a TIB investment would be viable for many years to come," Sherman says. "There was a lot of overwhelming evidence that the TIB platform was the way to go. The cost of ownership and administration should drop while at the same time allowing us to be more responsive to the traders' data needs."

The older TIB infrastructure provided support for Reuters Quote Feed (RQF) and Telerate Digital Page Feed (TDPF) and included distributed messaging across a WAN for the Paris and New York offices. The main components of the older front ends consisted of Marketsheet for Unix (MSU) as well as Wingz and Applix spreadsheet applications. The CDC subsidiary is pursuing upgrades for its Applix applications and will be keeping its long-distance distributed messaging link.

The new TIB infrastructure is not radically different, but it will provide support for Reuters Select Feed Plus (RSFP), version 7.2, as well as TDPF (now offered through Bridge Information Systems). The front end will be able to support Tibco's MSU and Marketsheet for Windows, Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet and the Applix spreadsheet applications, says Sherman. The subsidiary is investigating upgrades to new versions of Applix's applications that support the Solaris brand of Unix from Sun Microsystems.

The Excel spreadsheets on traders' desks have real-time links to the TIB through add-ins created with Tibco's TIB Automation toolkit for TIB-to-Excel integration, Sherman says. The integration will be handled through RV.

In preparation for Y2K, the CDC group in New York migrated to Solaris 2.51 about 10 months ago, and has implemented patches from Sun that make its applications Y2K-compliant, says Sherman. Sun has announced that Solaris 2.6 is the version that provides compliance without patches. "We're looking at migrating to Solaris 2.6," he says, and that will be complete by June 1999 "at the latest". The OS upgrade mirrors the front-end hardware upgrade that will provide traders with Sun's Ultra1 workstations.

The major change behind the scenes is the accommodation of Tibco's RV and Tibco's traditional ciServer offering, Sherman says. Both are communication demons supporting IP multicasting, with RV paving the way for NT links to the TIB and ciServer maintaining the TIB connectivity for native Unix clients. Even though NT is a part of the plan, the Marketsheet upgrade will be for Unix-based clients, Sherman says.

As the Y2K upgrade progresses, the applications and other code on traders' workstations may have to be rewritten, and it's at that point when the subsidiary will delve into the possibility of migrating traders to the NT environment, says Sherman.

An audit of the applications running on traders' desks has been done and will serve as the basis for making changes, Sherman says. "I think we have that pretty well in hand," he says. There are likely to be transitions to NT as a result of this effort, but traders will not be forced into the new environment, he adds.

"We leave the decision to them (traders)," Sherman says. "We want to provide the traders with the right tool for the right job. So we're not forcing them onto one platform or another."

The move to NT by some members of the trading staff will underline some of the problems that Sherman has found with Marketsheet. "They (Tibco) have to do a better job of leveraging NT," says Sherman who used to work for Tibco's client technical services group in New York.

"MSW is incredibly powerful, but it could be more user-friendly," Sherman says. "We (his staff) have a decent amount of experience with it (MSW) from other firms," he adds. Before his current post, Sherman was a market data analyst for Greenwich Capital Markets, a division of NatWest Markets based in Greenwich, Connecticut. MSW is "very much a developer's application" that is feature-rich with interface development tools and object-orientation, which is to the liking of a programmer. However, for the trading environment this "makes it somewhat tough to support".

Tibco's chief technology officer (CTO) James Powell says he finds Sherman's comment about NT "curious" because MSW offers very close integration with NT, in particular with its support for 32-bit computing and for Microsoft's ActiveX.

As for the user-friendliness of MSW, Powell says that the offering is meant to be "highly configurable" so that users can build sheets their way. However, Powell does acknowledge that this complaint has been lodged against MSW in the past. "We are working very hard to improve that," he says. A step in that direction is the addition of Microsoft-based Wizards that can guide traders "through the setup of complex components".

As for Kobra running in the TIB environment, Powell says Tibco is moving toward a full embrace of whatever display application, "be it Bridgestation, Kobra or Active1", that the user wants.

On the positive side, the older TIB environment was "much more labour intensive", Sherman says. Additionally, the latest version of the Marketsheet application is more object-oriented, which makes it much easier to develop tools and objects that can be added to a trader's sheet, he says.

The process of revamping the TIB infrastructure at the subsidiary is about 60 to 70 per cent complete, while the changes on the client side have just begun, Sherman says. The client workstations need to be individually configured to make use of the new environment.

Aside from migrating to the new TIB environment, the CDC is in the final stages of deciding which middleware to adopt for enterprise-wide integration between the front and back offices. Products from Braid, New Era of Networks (Neon) and Mint Communication Systems are in the running and a decision is imminent, Sherman says.