Reuters Refines Dealing 2000 With Datafeed Server Product

Reuters' strategy to provide users with the ability to take data from its Dealing 2000 foreign exchange transaction services for use in their digital data distribution systems and applications is taking further shape.

Third-party developers are beginning to introduce products taking advantage of the new feeds and a new server product, the Dealing 2000 Datafeed Server (D2DS), according to FX Week's sister publication Dealing with Technology.

D2DS has apparently been beta tested at a number of London sites, sources say, and officially ended testing earlier this summer when it was designated as "RRI" - Ready for Revenue and Installation, Reuters' designation for the full release of a product. Other sources say that though the product has RRI status, it is still being developed by New York-based software house Market Arts.

According to Reuters officials, D2DS is being rolled-out in two phases, the first of which is designated RRI, while a second phase, incorporating the ability to accept data from Dealing 2000's Conversational Overview Gateway (COG) is under development.

Until the advent of COG, announced earlier this year, Dealing 2000 had two output feeds, both of which have been available for some two years. The Ticket Output Feed (TOF) provides full records of completed deals in digital form. Data from the TOF can be incorporated in other systems, such as position-keeping and risk-management applications, as soon as a transaction has been confirmed.

The second output is the Current Interest Feed (CIF), which broadcasts information concerning active conversations on the Dealing 2000-1 conversational dealing service. CIF data includes the name of the counterparty, the currencies being traded and date information. Applications can take CIF data and use it to supply a trader with real-time information on-screen - typically it would offer traders data on the counterparty's limits or their own positions.

Prior to the advent of D2DS Phase 1, users could only connect both TOF and CIF feeds to a single system, limiting their usefulness. D2DS, which runs on Sun Microsystems Sparcserver hardware, takes the output from one or both feeds and allows it to be passed to any number of systems using Reuters' Source/Sink Library (SSL) application programming interface (API). The SSL output delivers the TOF and CIF data in Reuter Instrument Code (RIC) format.

The more recent COG feed is intended to address one of the problems of taking data from conversational dealing systems such as Dealing 2000-1, which is that not all conversations end in deals, and sometimes it is not entirely clear what deal has been struck, resulting in post-trade analysis. COG aims to overcome this by offering three items of information: conversation text, data on incoming calls and the logical result of a conversation.

This information allows dealers and managers to monitor conversations, and use the data to keep track of the results. The data can be displayed on dealers' terminals or as a management overview displayed by various criteria, such as all dollar/mark deals.

COG is now only available separately from both TOF and CIF, and from D2DS. Dealing 2000 controllers can handle up to 12 keystations - and D2DS can take data from up to 20 controllers - but the COG currently requires the 12th keystation to be used as the COG gateway, with a separate output for each controller. In the second phase of D2DS, COG information will be combined with the other datafeeds for distribution in SSL format.

The provision of data from all three feeds in SSL format has allowed Reuters to recruit a number of third-party software developers to provide applications taking advantage of it. The vendor has created a transaction application programme similar to its more general third-party applications programme. Some 20 applications are listed under the programme, along with systems integration tools and consultancy services.