Andrew’s Blog: Details, Details
With most things in life, the devil is surely in the detail. Baby packed and ready to go, car loaded and full of gas, route planned and maps in the front seat: where are the car keys?
And when all the big hoo-ha’s at the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have mulled and remulled the logic of Thomson’s bid to acquire Reuters (although it’s looking more like a reverse from where we’re sitting – just back from France, of course, so completely off the map), it’s going to be the in the detail where things start to get scratchy. For our very very vertical world of low-latency market data delivery infrastructures, that means: what happens about Thomson’s recent deal with Wombat Financial?
As readers of our Market Data Insight newsletter will be well aware, this deal, which effectively establishes Wombat as the data model and delivery infrastructure for Thomson Financial’s new Thomson Data Feed direct exchange and consolidated datafeed offering, was many months in the making and of strategic value to both sides. The question is: would a combined Reuters-Thomson entity need such a thing?
The Reuters camp would (I think) say no. Reuters has its RDF Direct hosted/managed direct exchange feed/feedhandler offering (see Pete blogs passim), the RDF data feed itself, and its own well established data model. Furthermore, its Reuters Instrument Code (RIC) is so well entrenched that the company had to abandon an earlier attempt to swap out its own data model for that of acquiree Bridge Information Systems, again as MDI readers know only too well.
Thomson, though, may beg to differ. Wombat has made great strides in establishing itself as a pioneer of low-latency market data delivery. Indeed, one could argue that if Reuters had had its wits about it a couple of years ago, there would be no place for such a whipper-snapping upstart, as we like to call them (although, to be fair, that’s hardly an accurate description these days).
So, while the big shots puff and blow about stakeholder value, EBITDA and tenuous market share statistics (we’re looking forward to the regulators getting their hot little hands around that one), we’ll be looking to see how the drama in this particular backwoods plays out.
