Interactive Data’s upgrade to its feed handler for the Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform – or TREP – adds both content and functionality. The version 2.0 release of the software adds market data content with an emphasis on Level 2 equity markets and functionality including a generic symbol remap that allows users to map existing symbology to the symbols used by Interactive Data’s consolidated feed and power multiple applications across TREP infrastructures with the feed.

The company describes version 2.0 of the feed handler as a major release and says it is designed to help customers reduce the effort involved in switching market data providers as it avoids the need to rework applications. It also plays into the company’s strategy to deliver simple, low cost, yet high value for money solutions.

The feed handler provides the technical capability to map any vendor or proprietary symbology to Interactive Data symbology and, with the exception of Thomson Reuters’ RICs, Interactive Data can help customers achieve the mapping exercise.

In the case of Thomson Reuters’ RICs, the Extended RIC Licence, which was agreed by the European Commission and Thomson Reuters to settle an antitrust investigation into the vendor’s restrictions around the use of RICs, Interactive Data cannot help customers map RICs to its symbols or perform the mapping exercise. However, customers and third parties that are not data vendors competing with Thomson Reuters can use the Extended RIC licence to do just that.

Glenn Wasserman, senior vice president and global head of product management for Interactive Data’s trading solutions, explains: “Mapping the symbologies used by a customer’s apps to our symbology makes it possible for the apps to continue to use the existing symbologies and get data from our feed handler. The translation mechanism in the feed handler allows customers to migrate from one source of data to another without having to open up the apps and make changes to their code. This lowers the effort of replacing an existing market data provider with Interactive Data and its consolidated feed.”

As well as symbology mapping, version 2.0 of the Interactive Data feed handler for TREP has an interface including a high fidelity implementation of the native TREP data model. This allows the feed handler to present data to vendor and proprietary apps using the same data models as the applications were originally designed to use, again allowing the Interactive Data consolidated feed to be used by many apps without the need for reengineering.

Wasserman says: “Many market data vendors have feed handles to integrate with TREP, but ours is significantly different because of its symbol mapping capability and its ability to replicate the data models customer apps are written to.”

Interactive Data released the upgraded feed handler for TREP this week and is beginning to roll it out to existing users at no additional charge and talk to new prospects. Wasserman concludes: “We want to sell more data feeds to TREP customers and we want to power their applications with value for money, high quality data.”