Linux grabs big win with Reuters
Reuters will announce plans Thursday to bring its financial information software to Linux in conjunction with Red Hat, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, sources say.
Morgan Stanley will be one among other customers using the software, sources familiar with the project said. Red Hat, the leading seller of the Linux operating system, announced in March that Morgan Stanley was a customer.
Red Hat, Intel and HP declined to comment. Reuters didn't respond to e-mail seeking comment.
Sun, the top dog of the Unix server and workstation markets and a major force in financial services, is working aggressively to keep its Unix computers competitively priced but in February decided to embrace Linux.
Reuters Chief Technology Officer Mike Sayers plans to announce the deal along with Peter Blackmore, head of HP's server and high-end hardware group, and Mike Evans, vice president of business development at Red Hat. The announcement comes at the end of the Strategic Directions 2002 conference sponsored by Reuters and Tibco in San Francisco on Thursday.
The deal is a further indication of Linux's gradual maturity into a "reasonable and effective" product, said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice, pointing also to Credit Suisse First Boston's choice to use Linux servers for its financial software.
Reuters will bring the software to Linux running on HP workstations using Intel's Xeon and Itanium 2 processors. The company has been working on the project for months, sources said. The deal with Reuters was forged with Compaq Computer; HP inherited the arrangement through its merger with Compaq, sources said.
RMDS is used to integrate and distribute information such as market data provided by Reuters' Triarch system and Tibco's Market Data Distribution System. It can be modified in such a way that companies' in-house software can tap into its features.