![]() ![]() It is not at all unusual, even in high-tech firms, for information about a single customer to be spread across a number of different and incompatible databases. Companies have accumulated layers and layers of IT systems, many of which are unable to talk to each other. ![]() But the need to tie together disparate computer systems is even more noticeable outside the financial world. For one thing, capital markets, where most transactions are time-sensitive, have traditionally adopted new technology before the rest of the economy does. In 1997, he founded Tibco (The Information Bus Company), because he was sure that firms other than those on Wall Street would soon need similar technology. Mr Ranadivé's first start-up, Teknekron Software Systems, sold such messaging software to the financial-services sector. ![]() Only two monitors sit on a trader's desk-one for the firm's internal and PC applications and one for MarketSheet, a service that brings together all the information a trader needs on one screen: stock quotes, news feeds, earnings information, graphs.Ĭompanies have accumulated layers and layers of IT systems, many of which are unable to talk to each other Today, the trading floor at Goldman Sachs looks very different. This way of distributing information, called “publish and subscribe”, became the basis for many digital trading systems on Wall Street. Traders can subscribe to these feeds and be updated automatically. The software does not send news items or stock quotes to individual traders, but “publishes” them to electronic addresses representing a subject, for example or. This universal data conduit made it possible for traders to get exactly the information they wanted. Mr Ranadivé's solution was what he calls “the information bus”-a way of reducing the data formats of the different news sources to a common denominator so that they could be displayed together. Building a system for each trader would have been too costly and complex. The obvious answer to this IT chaos-to build one huge, integrated system-was impracticable, because it would have been impossible to get all those involved to agree to a common set of standards. He then had to aggregate all the information himself, often using nothing more high-tech than a pen and paper. In a business where every second counts, each desk was packed with as many as 18 separate monitors and several keyboards so that the trader could draw information from a range of 25 different, technologically incompatible news sources. The room looked like the warehouse of a disorganised computer store, Mr Ranadivé writes in his book “The Power of Now” (McGraw-Hill, 1999). Indian-born Mr Ranadivé was one of the first to think about this because he had seen the opposite in action-on a trading floor at Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, in the mid-1980s. And because users cannot keep track of all those rows and columns, they need an intuitive overview of the information they really care about. But they also need good tools so they can easily change “macros”. To become real-time, companies must have an overarching “spreadsheet” that connects everything they do. ![]()
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