Bloomberg Pushes NEXT Migration

After an approximate $100 million investment and two years of development, Bloomberg successfully migrated a third of its 313,000 Bloomberg Professional Services clients on to its Bloomberg NEXT version of the vendor’s platform, according the senior Bloomberg officials.

The migration began three to four months ago and officials expect to have approximately 90 percent of the Bloomberg clients on the new version by summer before ending support for the legacy version by the end of the year.

Starting tomorrow and going through April, Bloomberg will host Bloomberg NEXT training sessions in 16 cities around the world, where clients can work with a variety of Bloomberg NEXT experts to help with the switchover.

Since Bloomberg officials wait until roughly a third of its customers are on a new offering before speaking with the trade press, most Bloomberg users probably already have had some cursory discussion on Bloomberg NEXT.

However, if you are not a Bloomberg subscriber or have been living in a cave for the past four months to avoid the Republican primary debates, the most important thing to know is that Bloomberg NEXT is the Bloomberg Professional Service. It may have a new name, but it has all of the existing capabilities as well as new ones and without an increase in the monthly or annual license.

Bloomberg officials sums up the new features as better “discoverability,” improved uniformity and an intuitive workflow. Discoverability translates to a better natural-language search engine that delivers the appropriate securities, functions, people and news search results by entering a few search terms. The vendor has worked to deploy a common visual design across the Bloomberg NEXT’s functions. An equities screen will look similar to a fixed-income screen, which will look similar another instrument’s trading screen.”

Tom Secunda, co-founder, vice-chairman and head of the financial products and service division at Bloomberg, attributes the common design to the growing complexity of the global markets, where traders and portfolio managers need to examine multiple markets before making trading decisions.

The truly interesting part of the new version is its streamline workflow. In the previous version of Bloomberg Professional Service, users tended to go through a few Bloomberg functions as they researched the answer for which they were looking. With the new version, Secunda explains that it provides the answer first and then users can drill down to examine the research that provided the answer and which was based on the user’s profile.

The recommend research results come from a user’s personal behavior on the system- commonly used functions or searchers are returned higher on the results list; a general profile, which matches users with similar roles like equities or fixed-income traders delivers different results, and then Bloomberg NEXT uses a sophisticated algorithm to weigh which results should be returned across the entire platform.

Under this system a new user who does not have personal history on the system still can benefit from the usage patterns of others with similar roles, explains Secunda.