Slater Takes On Marketing of Glow

Former Duncannon Group principal Brian Slater has taken on marketing activities for M&M Sentinel's Glow tool, which monitors usage of Bloomberg products, Slater says.

Duncannon had provided the marketing function for M&M for the last two years (IMD, July 7, 2003). But Duncannon underwent a series of executive changes earlier this year, which included Slater's own departure in March (IMD, March 21).

Slater worked at Duncannon on a contract basis. Of the other former Duncannon principals, Tim Dudgeon—also a contractor—has moved to Merrill Lynch, while co-owner Bruce O'Donnell is working at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Co-owner George Liscinsky says Duncannon continues to have a non-exclusive agreement with M&M to sell and consult around Glow.

M&M officials did not return calls for comment by press time.

Slater says that he has taken on marketing for Glow following a verbal agreement between himself and M&M "a couple of months ago."

Since then, he says he has been putting together an approach to package Glow for the marketplace. He has not yet completed this phase but says he is seeking partners among undisclosed vendors of market data cost management platforms and is close to agreement with some.

Slater says he is particularly looking for partners in Europe, where Glow has less business and where a partner would be able to provide local support. However, partners would have to establish "clear zones of coverage" to prevent vendors from selling Glow into each other's client bases.

"We cover the US adequately from the point of view of support," Slater says. "We see these relationships as a way of ensuring global coverage without being in a [geographical] zone."

Glow currently integrates with MDSL's MDM platform and BST's FinOffice suite.

Glow provides detailed monitoring of how end users are utilizing their Bloomberg terminals. It can be used to monitor terminal activity, e-mail usage and access to specific quotes, functions, pages and news, making it possible to capture the overall usage of a terminal. This can then be integrated with a market data management platform that holds details of contracts and users to assess whether end users really require their incumbent terminal or can make do with cheaper solutions.

"If a firm has a management platform, it helps a tremendous amount to know who [the user] is, what they do, and where they sit. It allows you to class people by job type and why they are doing what they're doing," Slater says.

He says that he will continue to develop the system with M&M. Current projects include porting the system from Unix to a Microsoft Windows environment, which is a response to user demand for the system on different platforms, he says.