Waters Rankings 2019: Best Market Data Provider: Bloomberg

In addition to investing in coverage, data quality, and an infrastructure comprised of global ticker plants to ensure low-latency data delivery, Bloomberg—which won the inaugural best market data provider award—has been upgrading key technology components by making its content more widely available.

Though the vendor is best-known for delivering its content via its premium-subscription Bloomberg Professional terminal, its latest initiatives focus more on administrative elements that allow firms to monitor costs, and allow Bloomberg to deliver content via other non-proprietary mechanisms.

For example, the vendor has made significant investment in putting its own technology into the cloud with fast connections back to Bloomberg’s datacenters.

“We are seeing a lot of success with customers moving market data to the cloud,” says Tony McManus, enterprise data CIO at Bloomberg. “Customers are benefiting from the elasticity that the cloud provides around storage, for example. In our mind, if a customer is deploying technology somewhere, Bloomberg should not be a barrier to that.”

On the administrative side, Bloomberg is re-releasing its decade-old B-Pipe Appliance Monitoring System (BAMS) and Entitlements Management Reporting System (EMRS) desktop admin tools as web applications this year. Bloomberg expects to complete the new BAMS over the summer, and EMRS in the fall.

McManus says one reason behind the initiative is a changing customer base, and a more mobile workforce, making web and API access to tools around the vendor’s data more important.

He says the vendor measures the success of its products not only by overall user numbers, but also by actual usage levels at existing customers, and on how it can better serve those users.

“Our UX design department did a tremendous amount of work to take those existing workflows and redesign them so that they are intuitive and easy to use,” McManus says.