Behind the markets

“Ninety-three percent of our revenue comes from the financial services market — data and trading systems,” says Mike Sayers, the London-based company’s CTO. Maintaining a competitive edge and making advancements for the company’s principal customers drives much of Sayers’ agenda.

His work leading some 2,500 technologists focuses on a theme familiar to CTOs. “You’re always driving the technology curve to restrain the cost of business. … Trying to reduce the total cost of ownership is relevant for us as it is for [our customers],” says Sayers, who started with Reuters in 1977 as a systems programmer working on a new editorial system.

Keeping costs down for Reuters’ financial services customers has Sayers currently in beta on a large Linux project. Dubbed “Reuters Market Data Systems” (RMDS). Announced in May of this year, this project has Reuters working with Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Red Hat to aggregate market news and data on Intel-based servers with Linux. The move supports financial institutions using Intel architecture to reduce the cost and improve the flexibility and performance of their market-data platforms.

The CTO’s work with vendors is an important part of Reuters’ positioning in the financial services, media, and IT industries. “We’re putting more emphasis on the work of our strategic key vendors — helping leverage their investments in R&D,” he says.

This strategic partnering with key vendors has not gone unnoticed among other Reuters execs. “One of the innovative aspects to Mike’s leadership has been his introduction of a strategic technology partner program,” says Sayers’ boss, Tom Glocer, Reuter’s chief executive. A good example of this, says Glocer, has been Reuters’ joint development with Microsoft of a standards-based, secure, instant messaging application for the financial services markets.

Developing an IM tool for the financial services industry is no small feat. According to an April 2002 Gartner report, most current and free IM systems are based on nonstandard, proprietary architectures that employ low-level Internet protocols. This leaves IM users — and corporations — with little or no security error checking and retransmission capabilities on IM communications. The report titled “Collaboration in the Financial Services Industry,” finds that IM solutions for this industry must overcome these obstacles to meet usability, security, and regulatory issues.

Reuters’ IM program, which has been two and a half years in the making, will be extremely important to the financial services industry, Sayers says. “IM is getting used anyway. The trouble is the audit trail [with IM]. … This has to be suited to the needs of [the industry]. It has to be SEC compliant and encrypted.”

Sayers has a discretionary R&D budget equal to approximately 7 percent of revenues with which he can test “a few things and rattle a few cages. Although I won’t spend money where there’s no business traction.” Sayers oversees innovation labs in New York and in Palo Alto, Calif. For the West Coast lab, Sayers thinks of it more as an innovation studio, where Reuters can work with current or potential customers.

It all comes back to his role as CTO serving customers and defining his company’s competitive edge. “There are two words, enabler and accelerator, to describe where technology sits in innovation,” Sayers says. “The tech side in an organization goes with the business side. If you work together, you can achieve exciting innovation. Keep looking for the marriage [of technology and innovation] that’s a breakthrough.”