Nomura To Replace CSK Software's Mips With Triarch 2000

Nomura Securities International will replace CSK Software's Mips digital data distribution system with Reuters' Triarch 2000 and Kobra display software at its 200-position New York fixed income trading floor at 2 World Financial Center over the next six months.

A Nomura spokesperson declines to comment on the platform switch. But a source at the firm says: "Mips simply didn't work," adding that "there were repeated and unexplained data flow interruptions. The application programming interface was difficult to program. And support was nonexistent; it was consistently 'rev-locked,' or 'revision-locked,' meaning that whenever we upgraded our hardware or software, Mips could not accommodate the change."

Nomura decided to take the Triarch plunge after evaluating Bridge's Market Vision platform, Tibco's Information Bus and Dow Jones Telerate's TTRS, the source says. Ultimately, the firm chose Triarch for a number of reasons.

For one, the firm already uses Triarch in its equity group, having switched that 100-position floor in mid-1995. Previously, it used a combination of CSK technologies including Mips, Micrognosis video switches and the Tradelook page-based digital platform, according to the Nomura source. "But we also were favorably inclined towards Triarch because it runs on a lot of different platforms, there's wide market acceptance of it, it's available at a low cost, and it's represented by a big backer," the source says.

Although Nomura will be changing its data distribution platform, the firm has no plans to alter the hardware, operating software or market data supporting its trading floors. Nomura's primary market data sources are Reuters, Dow Jones Telerate, Bloomberg and feeds from interdealer-brokers.

Last spring, Nomura rolled out a Leading Market Technologies application module called Baskettrader to its equity and derivatives traders (Trading Systems Technology, April 15, 1996). The module enables users to create, price, test and run simulations on baskets of instruments. This helps traders and salespeople calculate clients' risk and return requirements and price transactions using live market quotes from Reuters' Selectfeed Plus. In addition, Baskettrader can incorporate historical data--which at Nomura is principally Reuters' TS1 feed--to show clients how the basket would perform under a variety of market conditions.