MARKET DATA PERSPECTIVES

With all the recent fuss over Reuters' share price and prospects for Instinet, last week it was Tibco's turn to take the spotlight.

The big news was the departure of Simon Yencken, who had been mandated to merge Reuters' two main market data platforms--Triarch and TIB. Yencken, crowned as head of the consolidation team early this year, had been pushing to bring together the TIB Rendezvous infrastructure and Reuters Kobra desktop display application.

The hope was to create a single market data platform product line without upsetting too many customers. And much progress has apparently been made.

New Reuters Trading Systems boss Phil Green didn't seem to care about that, though. Yencken is out after Green's first shot at restructuring the group. Whether there'll be more fallout remains to be seen.

The other, perhaps odd, news to come out of this space came in the form of an analyst's report from Goldman Sachs, which was published last week. In their report, Goldman's analysts' point out that Reuters' 64 percent stake in Tibco Software represents some 20 percent of Reuters' total market valuation.

Tibco Software's share price has leaped since its IPO a few months ago. It was trading at more than $70 last week, up from an initial price of $38. The Goldman analysts saw this as a good sign: they rated Reuters a market outperformer.

Given recent gyrations, Mr. Job can use all the help he can get.