Workstations Abound At SIA Show; But Still Scarce On Trading Floors

Today's couch potatoes wonder how they managed to watch TV without their color sets. If this year's Securities Industry Association Information Management Exhibit is any indicator, tomorrow's traders will wonder how they survived without a graphical user interface (GUI) for their hires, high-octane color workstations.

Once it was enough to simply access market data. Then it had to be manipulated. Now it's got to manipulate us. At today's trader workstation, information has to fight for attention. Colored arrows, audible alerts and 3-D graphics all vie for recognition. Where is this sensory escalation leading? To big bucks for hardware vendors.

Where pride of place once went to information vendors and switch vendors, today's SIA expo is increasingly dominated by hardware vendors. Hardware vendors, in turn, are increasingly dependent on software developers to sell their boxes. It was gratifying to see many of the same applications (Integrated Analytics' Market Mind and MarketVision, to name just two) running at several hardware vendors' stands.

Less gratifying was the SIA's last minute decision to close all conference workshop sessions to the working press. SIA organizers offered no explanation for dropping the iron curtain, but a skittish presenter may have been behind it.

Sun Microsystems Inc. managed to populate its entire booth with applications running on OPEN LOOK, Sun and AT&T's new graphical user interface. "SPARC/UNIX/OPEN LOOK/ONC is now the de facto standard platform for workstation-based financial services applications," says Jordan Graham, manager of financial services marketing at Sun Microsystems.

At least it will be when Sun starts shipping it as standard equipment with all workstations starting in July. Never mind the 3,000-plus applications running on SunView. When you own 50 percent of the financial services workstation marketplace you can dictate standards. Or can you?

Motif, another new "industry-standard" GUI is the last vestige of a once-proud Open Software Foundation and Open Look's arch-rival. Sun mounted an intense lobbying effort to put Motif in the shade. But many software developers claim the market's going Motif.

An informal poll registered widespread apathy, as well as support for both GUIs. According to those who claim to know, Open Look offers a more standardized widget vocabulary, less design flexibility, and less support for the resource subsystems in X. Motif is said to be more easily portable, but TST offers no guarantees.

One of the few surprises of the show was FD Consulting Inc.'s introduction of its X-Trade front-end for equities trading. FD's strength has always been its ticker plant architecture, but the firm has been working to address its weakness at the user interface. FD appeared on the Concurrent Computer Corp. stand.

X-Trade, which includes the standard array of quote screen options -- scrolling news, snap quotes and customizable alerts -- was developed for FD by Greenwich-based software house Clearlight International.

Bystanders at FD's display were scorched by the energy field of three Reuters mega-executives (Andre Villeneuve, President, Reuters North America, John Hull, group product leader, transaction products and marketing executive Peter Thomas) who stopped by at X-Trade's debut.

There was some last-minute scurrying in Positron Industries Inc.'s SIA exhibit area to conceal one of its latest products, a digital/video local data distribution system, A.K.A. MDC2000. Apparently, Market Data Corp. (MDC) decided to pull the product after getting wind of an article describing the system in this publication (TST, May 21).

The system, MDC's MDC2000 CATV data distribution network, is actually built around technology developed by Positron, sources say. Telerate Inc. has close ties to Bernie Cantor, the majority owner of MDC, and ostensibly has taken an interest in the product. MDC2000 could be seen as an adjunct to Telerate's distribution technology, but more likely would be used to position MDC as a data distribution alternative to Telerate.

However Telerate and MDC view their teetering relationship, neither liked the idea of Positron sporting the MDC2000 product technology at the show, sources say. Both firms felt that more than enough had been said in the article, and that Positron should keep the system under wraps, they say. At the eleventh hour Positron hid the hardware and product literature under the skirted tables of its booth, preventing patrons from testing the accuracy of the TST article.

Although NYNEX Co.'s BIS Banking Systems Ltd. was able to snap up B.S. Microcomp Pty.'s DR-one dealing-room system from under the nose of IBM, Big Blue has signed a worldwide distribution contract for supply of the system. Thus DR-one took its place alongside several other third-party systems at the IBM booth.

IBM had signed distribution agreements covering Japan and the U.S. prior to BIS's acquisition of the system from B.S. Microcomp earlier this year. According to John McHugh, general manager of international sales and marketing for BIS Trading Systems Ltd., BIS and IBM thrashed out a new distribution agreement about a month ago. The accord gives IBM exclusive distribution rights, aside from BIS's own sales efforts, as well as rights to support of the system.

At the IBM booth, BIS demonstrated the OS/2 version of DR- one, featuring as it did last year a video window showing live footage of visitors to the booth. Around the corner, rival IBM business partner the International (London) Stock Exchange (ISE) was showing the same thing on its RDXII system (TST, Nov. 20, 1989). What they didn't show was footage of BIS executives lurking attentively at Telerate's MarketLan display as Toronto-based Softek Computer Services Inc.'s Robert Bond (no, not James) showed off his touch-sensitive Softek Trader Workstation.

The gloomy North American key telephone market produced at least one bright spot at the show: V Band Corp. became the first North American firm to offer a fully digital turret system. Dubbed ViAX DN, the system uses a modular, distributed architecture that purportedly takes up less backroom space than its predecessor, the ViAX Communications System.

With the advent of ISDN several years off in North America, the benefits of a fully digital system for now are limited. Nonetheless, the digital buzzword already carries marketing clout, and industry pundits recognize that as ISDN expands geographically across the U.S., digital technology will prevail as the next wave in turret design.

ViAX DN has already generated business: V Band is on the verge of signing a contract for a 250-position floor in Japan, sources say. Because the Japanese turret market has traditionally been closed to foreign suppliers (Hitachi is the dominant domestic vendor), the deal would mark a significant inroad for V Band in the Pacific Rim.

The only other digital turret system widely available in North America is built by Reuters Holdings PLC subsidiary Wyatts, based in London. That system, Keydeals 2000, was announced last February (TST, Feb. 26).

British Telecom, Contel IPC and Positron Industries Inc. have yet to release their own fully digital systems. Turret Equipment Corp. (TEC) did not have a booth at the SIA show, and sources say the firm is soon to close its doors for good. A spokesman for Canadian-based TIE/Communications, of which TEC is a division, declines comment.

In the hope of bringing some "true market discipline" to the proceedings, Austin, Texas-based Nirvana Systems Inc. demonstrated its Klatu automated trading assistant. Klatu, running on IBM PS/2 or AT or compatible computers, acts as a "user" of clients' trading software.

Nirvana says the system, running DOS, can be programmed to monitor applications resident on other computers. Among its "thousands of potential applications" are:

pulling information such as news or reports from multiple data sources and organizing it into a single file;

monitoring price levels worldwide, 24 hours a day, and calling brokers at home if preset limits are breached;

answering phone calls from authorized personnel and respond to specific requests; and

checking the status of prices or technical indicators at specific times.

Nirvana says the system is the result of more than 30,000 man-years of development. Klatu, the company says, "isn't quite human -- but he has human-like abilities."

FTT Alphameric, the systems integration subsidiary of troubled U.K.-based Alphameric PLC, showed its Open Trading System (OTS) on a Sun Microsystems Inc. SPARCstation-1 running UNIX. The dealing-room system had previously been available only on a DEC VAXstation 3100 running VMS in its workstation incarnation (TST, Nov. 6, 1989).

For the Sun machine, FTT Alphameric is making OTS available with Sun's OpenLook and Motif graphical user interfaces. Networking will be provided by Ethernet running TCP/IP.

Meanwhile, FTT Alphameric introduced VisionWare Ltd.'s XVision windowing software running on its mid-range OTS platform, an IBM 386 PC. XVision allows a user running Microsoft Windows to display X Windows applications running on another machine on the local area network. The user can also cut and paste between these X Windows applications and local DOS applications running on his PC.