Wellington Management Pilots EJV's UniVu For Bond Analytics

Wellington Management Co. is beta-testing UniVu, the fixed-income analytics product marketed by EJV Partners L.P. The investment firm, located in Boston, is using the product to deliver bond data, portfolio information and analytics to managers' IBM-compatible PCs.

Wellington plans to make the UniVu system available to 12 users eventually. Currently, UniVu is used by five portfolio managers and systems staff with a sixth station servicing a shared area.

The system has been in beta-test since September. It is expected to go live around 60 days after the completion of acceptance-testing, according to Bill Jervey, a vice president at the firm.

Acceptance tests are expected to begin by the end of the first quarter. "Until the integration with our in-house system is finished and we are comfortable with it," says Jervey, "we won't be moving forward into acceptance testing."

Wellington, which uses fundamental investment techniques, is seeking to address a growing need for fixed-income analytics, according to Jervey. Half of the $50 billion under management at Wellington is held in bonds.

The firm is integrating UniVu with a homegrown portfolio management system known as Morning Meeting, which is used to present external and internal data to managers on a daily basis.

The EJV pilot is also part of a wider move to a new generation of hardware just beginning to gain momentum at the firm.

Wellington's portfolio managers will gain access to UniVu applications via 486-based microprocessors from Intel Corp. running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows graphical user interface software. The PCs, linked by Ethernet local area network running the TCP/IP protocol, will be supported by Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARCstation-2 servers running the UniVu software under UNIX. The Windows-based applications will communicate across the LAN with the UNIX servers using Sun's Network File Server (NFS) software.

The company currently employs a mixed bag of IBM-compatible 286 and 386 microprocessors from Hewlett-Packard Co., which operate in DOS. Wellington plans to replace all desktop hardware at the firm with Windows-based Intel 486s. The upgrade, which will affect 300 users, should be complete by the end of 1993, according to Jervey.

The decision to install the EJV product was spurred by the product's "expanding universe of bond data and the growing set of fixed-income analytics," says Jervey. A key application available through UniVu will be access to and manipulation of data from Wellington's in-house database, which forms the core of the firm's proprietary Morning Meeting portfolio management system.

The database, which runs on a Hewlett-Packard 3000 mainframe computer, resides at Wellington's headquarters in Boston. The system is fed bond pricing data from Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Securities Pricing Service.

Wellington intends to allow its portfolio managers to download the Morning Meeting data into UniVu analytical programs running on the SPARCstation-2 servers. In addition, managers will be able to apply the raw Morning Meeting data, as well as the republished results of UniVu applications, to their own analytical programs built using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets running on their local PCs.

In addition to the analytical applications, managers will be able to write reports on their PCs using Microsoft's Powerpoint word-processing and graphical presentation software.

Also delivered via the LAN is a package of market news services known as Well News, Wellington's name for a package of third-party news services consolidated and distributed by Investment Software Systems Inc.

Well News, which also runs on a SPARCstation-2 server, draws upon news services from Reuters and Dow Jones, the latter providing its DowVision feed of consolidated Dow Jones news services. In addition, the system handles equity research reports from Thomson Financial Services Inc.'s First Call.

Real-time market data is distributed across the LAN by Kapiti PLC's Fist system. Fist, for Financial Information Systems Toolkit, comprises both workstation display and local distribution software for digital feeds. The system runs on Sun servers. Wellington makes use of Telekurs (North America) Inc.'s Ticker service and Telerate Systems Inc.'s TDPF page-based data feed product.

Other third-party services available via the LAN are Thomson's AutEx block-trading system and Bridge Information Systems Inc.'s real-time and analytical service.

Aside from receiving market data and analytics services on their desktop computers, Wellington's managers also attend daily morning meetings in an amphitheater at the firm's Boston office. Mounted there are three large screens, supported by an H-P Apollo DN 4500 server connected to the LAN.

One of the screens displays Bridge market data. The second displays Gould Research's Stock Val, which provides sensitivity analysis and projected earnings models. The third screen displays Morning Meeting.