Thomson Reuters Up in the Clouds

Almost 10 years ago, Thomson Reuters embarked on the development of their Elektron Data Platform and sold it as a mechanism to get faster as a data provider and closer to their customers.  As part of this effort they built data centers around the world to support their objectives and the efforts were highly successful.  That said, the rapidity by which technology advances is now encouraging the company to place their financial data into the cloud supported not by their own technology but by Amazon and the AWS products.

Financial data is highly transacted and Thomson Reuters counts as clients most financial companies of any consequence.   As a result of this implementation to AWS, their clients will gain increased flexibility in how they use data and how clients can develop new products based on this data.   Not only do clients not have to build and maintain their own data centers (obviously they can if they want) but they can build their own applications on AWS which in turn will allow them to be more flexible in how they service their customers.  The model Thomson Reuters is establishing could be revolutionary in the manner in which users manage financial data and service customers. 

"The enhancement to the Elektron Data Platform will initially provide access to real-time data on the secure and scalable Amazon Web Service (AWS) Cloud in North America, with plans to expand to Europe and Asia later this year. With the cloud API, data can be consumed natively on AWS, directed to applications based in other cloud environments, or to an on-premise environment.

As a simplified, conflated real-time service, the real-time in the cloud service can power up to three client applications at three updates per second across 50,000 instruments at the same time, which can be selected from the full universe of over 70 million instruments covered by the Elektron Data Platform."

No less important from this announcement is that by using AWS, Thomson Reuters will be buying in to a set of standards and protocols which will encourage application development, experimentation and likely broader usage.  This will lower the barriers to entry for many existing and new customers.

As the sheer amount of data increases and complexity grows, Thomson Reuters have taken the view that making data accessible can reduce complexity and help companies focus more on the delivery of analytics, machine learning applications and other innovations.   Enabling this without a cumbersome back end technical architecture will be the strategy all data managers will begin to execute.

(Press Release)

Michael Cairns is a business strategy consultant and executive.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com for project work or executive roles.  See here for examples of recent work.