Thomson Reuters has unveiled a ‘joined up’ approach to enterprise data management, creating a platform framework that embraces both real-time and non-real-time data. The so-called Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform draws on the long-serving front-office Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) that supports real time data, the existing securities master product, Reuters Reference Data System (RRDS), and new technology that the company acquired through the purchase of data management specialist m35 a year or so ago .
Reuters first worked with m35 in 2007 when it licensed technology from the company to build the Reuters’ Enterprise Integration Engine, a component of the Reuters Enterprise Platform that improved users’ ability to distribute data to applications and customers. At the time, Reuters said the enterprise platform, which incorporated RMDS, the company’s trading room integration system, embodied its vision of the convergence of real time market data and reference data, and that the platform provided ‘the prospect of integrating the two’.
Thomson Reuters has now moved further to fulfil that prospect through additional development of RDMS, the m35 technology that has become the Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform for Data Management and an expandable application programming interface (API) suite that supports the ‘joined up’ enterprise data management aspect of the new platform.
While Thomson Reuters has not pushed Enterprise Platform into the market with a furore of press conferences, the platform is an important advance in its competitive development and could be a winner with clients.
According to Terry Roche, executive vice president of information management systems at Thomson Reuters, “Clients want to improve the performance of data delivery. Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform for real time data is the successor to RMDS. It builds on the scalability, yet reduced infrastructure and cost we have built into RMDS and features a number of modules that all work together to give users a single platform vision.”
Modules already incorporated in the real-time area of the platform support functionality such as point-to-point data delivery, multicast delivery and Internet delivery, as well as Reuters’ wireless delivery system and wide area networking. More components are being built and Roche points out that, from the client’s point of view, back-end systems will need little change with easy-to-implement APIs already available.
Among the latest RMDS developments to become part of the enterprise platform framework are the Open Message Model, essentially an open set of data modelling tools that allows the representation of data using complex data structures and rich request parameters, and a binary message format called Reuters Wire Format that reduces the size of market data updates.
As real-time data management techniques have been developed, so too has Thomson Reuters evolved its Enterprise Platform for Data Management, which sits within the new enterprise platform service framework and deals with all non-real time data. This centralised data management platform uses a canonical data model to ensure consistent interpretation of data across an enterprise, supports a number of data types and asset classes, and integrates with RMDS to acquire data from real-time data streams. Going forward, Thomson Reuters is also planning to publish data from the back office to the front office.
Jason du Preez, Thomson Reuters global head of the Enterprise Platform for Data Management and a former m35 executive, says: “Risk management tops the list of our clients’ concerns, so this is a major driver for us and we differentiate in our focus on data transparency, flexibility and distribution timeliness.”
The company also promises reduced cost through automated data operations using the enterprise platform, high performance, data quality, scalability to meet emerging business needs and customer options of deploying the software on site, or tapping into a Thomson Reuters’ hosted or managed service.
Putting the two strands of the new Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform together, du Preez concludes: “We have two distinct solutions, but holistically our vision is of a single Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform.”
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