The service will use Microsoft’s communications technology, enabling Reuters to offer financial institutions a fast, cost effective, encrypted, and firewall-compliant communications channel covering their entire organisation and extending out to reach their own customers and suppliers.
Reuters.Net Messaging is a key element in Reuters strategy to work with customers to build a suite of communication and collaboration tools for the financial markets professional using internet technologies.
While financial institutions have depended on messaging for several years, many of the existing solutions do not meet all of their requirements. Reuters position at the heart of the global financial industry and Microsoft’s expertise in the development of business software mean the companies are uniquely placed to work together to meet this need within the market.
The global directory will allow industry professionals to create powerful networks of instantly available contacts and to conduct dynamic, text-based conversations.
Reuters will work closely with customers to develop tailored solutions for individual clients using Microsoft’s standards-based platform technology. Development will focus on the ability to integrate with in-house systems and Reuters own services such as Reuters 3000 Xtra. The service will be available over the Internet and the Radianz financial services network for those customers who require high-speed performance and additional security.
Tom Glocer, Reuters Chief Executive designate, said: Reuters.Net Messaging is at the heart of our strategy to develop next generation tools to facilitate collaboration within the global financial services community. By working with the latest standards-based technology from Microsoft, we will offer our customers a suite of communications tools for use within their firms and with external counterparties. In an industry where security, reliability and speed are paramount, Reuters.Net Messaging will deliver a genuine competitive edge.
We’re working with Reuters to bring a new, world-class real-time communications solution to the financial services industry, said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. By combining Reuters knowledge of financial markets with the power of Microsoft’s new technologies such as the .NET enterprise servers, we will enable financial companies to provide more efficient and secure communication for their customers.
The Microsoft platform for this service will be based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for enabling secure, reliable real-time collaboration between multiple PCs and other devices. SIP enables instant communications services supporting instant messaging, voice, video, and other collaborative resources – all of which can include the benefits of presence to give users more control over how others communicate with them.
