A publication of Waters Information
Services Inc. April 14 1997
Traders at Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce are
using a Microsoft Windows NT-based, 32-bit middleware tool from Xyris Software that, the
company claims, can port data from the Reuters Triarch digital data distribution platform
into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets 20 per cent faster the Reuters’ 16-bit Personal
Data Dictionary (PDD) tool.
Xyris, of New York, benchmarked the software, dubbed DataPump, to be able to transmit
9,000 fields of information on 450 securities into Excel in 22 seconds. By comparison, PDD
obtained the data in 42 seconds.
Although Reuters plans to introduce a 32-bit version of PDD in June, Xyris president
Maurice McGinley maintains that the architecture and multithreading operating system of
Xyris’ solution renders it faster than PDD for a number of reasons beyond its 32-bit
capacity.
However, Brendan Connelly, Reuters’ product group manager for display
applications, says its not fair to compare PDD to similar products developed by third
parties because Reuters doesn’t sell PDD as a separate product but as a component of
its Personal Trader Workstation (PTW). "PTW is a full display application,"
Connelly says.
But if the upcoming, 32-bit version of PDD was tested alongside similar tools developed
by third parties, Connelly suggests, users would find that it was capable of "almost
all" of the functions third-party solutions offer – including speed.
Connelly’s reluctance to compare PDD to other products is probably because Reuters
relies on third parties to develop specialized applications to work with Triarch because
not all Triarch users opt for Reuters’ PTW front-end display interface, and some
customers seek highly specific functions that are not included in PTW.
"We encourage third parties to develop very specific applications to work with the
Triarch backbone," Connelly says.
Xyris is not the only software house that has developed an alternative to PDD. Applix
offers a product called Real Time for Excel Direct which is designed similarly to DataPump
in the way it traffics the flow of data requests. However, unlike PDD and DataPump, Applix
has eschewed Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol on the client side,
maintaining that it slows down the flow of data.
High-end traders who subscribe to an excessive amount of data to perform intensive,
intricate calculations are slowed down by DDE, claims Matthew Gardiner, a product manager
at Applix. "So, we borrowed the same architecture that we developed for our
Unix-based Applixware tool. It’s a proprietary way to move data into and out of
Excel," Gardiner says.
In designing DataPump, however, Xyris decided to retain the DDE protocol on the desktop
and to focus, instead on the manner in which the software obtains data off the Triarch
server, known as the "sink distributor."
DataPump can be configured to process data requests at different speeds, McGinley says.
For another, he continues, its multithreading operating system permits several sets of
instructions to be processed at the same time. Finally, it can transmit data back to end
users over as many as four channels, or data pathways.
Using a feature that Xyris calls Maximum Pending Sink Open Requests, systems
administrators can configure DataPump to handle various levels of open, or outstanding
requests. PDD, on the other hand, has no such mechanism to pace the rate of requests being
sent to the Triarch distributor, McGinley says.
"If you don’t pace requests, you can overwhelm the sink distributor,"
explains McGinley, who likens the Maximum Pending Sink Open Request feature to
methodically placing requests on an assembly line – as opposed to allowing them to
surge toward the server all at once…
A trader at Merrill Lynch in London agrees that DataPump "regulates the flow of
data between the PC and the distribution system." He says this method enables data to
be taken off Triarch and placed into a spreadsheet in a "significantly faster
way" than PDD.
"When we were using PDD, it would often lock the spreadsheet. We’d then have
to reboot, and that got to be quite annoying after a while," he says.
A trader on Bear Stearns’ New York equities desk concurs that the orderly way in
which DataPump incorporates data from Triarch into Excel renders it a lot faster than PDD.
"We replaced PDD with [DataPump] because [it] can load a lot more [data fields] into
an Excel spreadsheet than PDD," he says.
In addition Xyris has also equipped DataPump with a tool that allows users to quickly
build customized, real-time quote screens. Called the Excel Field Injector, it creates
separate fields for different measurements of an instrument – such as bid/ask, last
quote and volume – and will update these fields with data as it changes. The Excel
Field Injector is very helpful to traders, McGinley believes, since most are familiar with
Excel. "Now they can use a tool they are accustomed to, to build customized quote
terminals," he says…
