The Reuters Holdings Plc news agency, traditionally known for its real-time services, has launched an integrated product line of historical information called Reuter:file. The company acknowledges that it committed something of an oversight by not getting more involved in historical information before now, and consequently, various competitors such as Dow Jones, Dialogue and IDC have stolen a very lucrative march on Reuters. However, over the past two years Reuters has made two acquisitions, London based Finsbury Data Services of Textline fame, and I P Sharp Associates of Toronto, both of which have made considerable contributions to Reuters’ revenues – in 1984 Reuters made $1m from historical data, by 1988 that figure had jumped to $36.9m. In return, Reuters has invested in new technology. I P Sharp now uses two IBM 3090 mainframes and Finsbury has four DEC VAX 6620s. Reuter’s new service is comprised of seven files: country reports, finance, trade, energy, corporate action (which monitors capital and dividend changes), Textline and Accountline – which provides the full unadjusted text of the annual reports of UK quoted companies, and is coded into sections to allow selected or whole retrieval. When Reuters acquired I P Sharp, it also acquired Sharp’s worldwide communication network and it is this that links users to the host computer. In addition to this network, Reuters will provide a personal computer communication package written in Turbo Pascal, taking 100Kb of memory, developed primarily for the MS-DOS market, but Macintosh users can expect a similar package later this year. Apart from the launch of Reuter:file, Reuters is planning to release three other historical information products – Analytics 2000, Snapshot and Textline Corporate News Retrieval. Analytics is intended to be a general securities analysis system delivered on Sun Microsystems 386i workstations and Snapshot is aimed at clients who need a snapshot of financial data and it will run from mainframe to mainframe or client personal computer to host mainframe. Textline Corporate News is essentially a repackaged Textline with an alert facility that may be accessed using Reuters equipment or various digital switching services. All three services are being tested on beta sites at present and should be available by the year-end.
