|
 |
(Left
to right): DEBORAH GROSSMAN,
executive vice president; MATT MCCORMICK,
senior vice president–technical operations; MARTIN
BRADING, senior vice president of Customer Relationship
Management Centers-Americas |
REUTERS:
INFORMATION GIANT
|
REUTERS
MOVES CRITICAL OPERATIONS TO ST. LOUIS
BY KEVIN KIPP
What do St. Louis and London have in common?
The language—sort of. But also, nowhere else does Reuters boast
such a concentration of operational centers, administrative skill
and technical talent.
To date, the hundred-and-a-half-year-old British firm has consolidated
its American “customer relationship management center” here, migrating
people and assets from both Long Island and Chicago. Its other CRMCs
are in towns like Sydney, Geneva and London.
Reuters is also establishing one of its four worldwide software
“development centers” in St. Louis, with some activity farmed out
to Kansas City. Their other centers are in Paris, Bangkok and London.
Finally, Reuters’ American “business service center” is located
in St. Louis. Their four other centers are in Singapore, Nicosia
(Cyprus), Amsterdam, and London.
According to company documents, “With the acquisition of Bridge
Information Systems, the global provider of financial information,
news and technology solutions has set down local roots.
“To be sure they took hold and provided a solid foundation for business
growth,” the statement continues, “the company made and continues
to make significant investments in its St. Louis neighborhood. Worldwide
expansion is their ultimate goal, but growing and enriching the
St. Louis community is their immediate plan.”
The facilities in St. Louis are already a significant part of Reuters’
global operations, and as they continue to combine the Reuters and
Bridge cultures, St. Louis has become the company’s nerve center.
All business critical functions are and will continue to be performed
from St. Louis. Administrative activities such as accounts payable,
accounts receivable and human resources have been consolidated here.
In addition, because Bridge had built a highly sophisticated technology
development center, Reuters is capitalizing on the existing capabilities
and is developing a new-generation architecture that will provide
a common infrastructure for the entire product portfolio.
|
The
facilities in St. Louis are already a significant
part of Reuters’ global operations. |
|
Keeping Reuters on track locally, as well as overseeing operations
of the business service center, is Reuters executive vice president
and the senior site officer Deborah Grossman.
Company documents describe her senior site officer duties as having
responsibility for “building a local community, enhancing operations
and maintaining awareness of all Reuters issues to ensure results
are delivered effectively.”
She says that means serving as “basically the central point of coordination
for everything that happens in St. Louis.”
Originally her duties were concerned primarily with the integration
of those portions of her former employer, Bridge Information Systems,
which Reuters purchased for $373 million in cash and debt. The deal
was announced in April 2001 and completed last October.
Following the acquisition, state and local economic developers worked
to encourage Reuters to retain and expand the St. Louis operation.
In fact, in February 2002, Gov. Bob Holden joined RCGA officials
in meeting in New York with Reuters America’s Chief Executive Officer
Phillip Lynch and Reuters’ top real estate executives. The Governor
and First Lady Lori Hauser Holden also joined then RCGA Chairman
John Bachmann and Kay Bachmann in hosting the Lynches at the Carnegie
Hall performance by the Saint Louis Symphony. Ultimately these efforts
paid off in the retention of 600 Reuters jobs.
Asked what convinced them to not only stay in St. Louis, but beef
up operations here, Grossman says “We already had in place here
an incredibly talented team, a good cost basis, and an established
campus that provides interaction among operations, development and
the other work teams. I think it takes an incredibly mature and
astute senior management to make that kind of decision.”
She adds that Reuters’ decision to relocate product development
work here “related to the Bridge-based platform. The technology
was an opportunity to standardize,” she says, “moving to a single
platform for our products. That’s what we’re doing in St. Louis
under Kirk Thomas’ leadership.”
KIRK
THOMAS
senior vice president of development, Reuters
|
|
He is the senior vice president of development, also a Bridge alum,
in charge of streamlining Reuters’ development organization in (what
the Brits call) “the Americas.”
Grossman explains that the challenge is partially geographic: “Reuters
has development centers all over the globe, plus a long list in
the U.S. due to acquisitions...picking up talent when we could.
Now, however, we have decided to consolidate those centers for efficiency’s
sake.
“When Reuters acquired Bridge, they realized that St. Louis offered
more opportunity than practically any other location in the United
States or abroad,” she says. “St. Louis is widely recognized as
the gateway to the west and that makes the city the ideal location
for developing new business opportunities in western cities. In
addition, St. Louis has a highly attractive workforce—people in
St. Louis are educated, tech-savvy and have strong work and family
ethics.” Grossman continues.
The task is also technologic: Those acquisitions have led to a vast
network of information sources throughout the company as well as
a crazy quilt of architectures and platforms designed variously
to handle content, analytics, storage, trading and messaging capabilities.
Grossman says her other set of duties—the BSC, which she calls “shared
services”—is “a global job, but I get to do it from here.”
From here, she oversees the execution of business critical functions:
finance and administrative activities, including accounts payable,
accounts receivable, cash management, risk management, vendor management
and more.
What’s more she has taken on those duties during a revamping effort
at Reuters called “finance and administration transformation program.”
FATP introduced new processes, systems and organizational models
to create what company briefing documents call “a smaller and smarter
F&A function.”
(Or: Do more, do it better, and do it with less. How very colonial,
Midwestern even. Fair enough. Grossman is a Midwesterner, a native
of Peoria and a graduate of Bradley University. Her MBA is from
Washington University and her law degree is from the University
of Illinois.)
Her current staff numbers 65, about the full compliment she can
expect. Forty of those positions have “migrated” from Hauppauge,
N.Y., on Long Island.
In her elevator-ride description of the London-founded Reuters,
Grossman says, “Reuters is a global information company that collects
data on 40,000 companies and 250 markets and exchanges that we make
available to financial professionals, people in the media and people
in corporate positions. They can use that information to manage
their business and make better decisions.”
More detail: Reuters has 16,000 employees worldwide. St. Louis is
home to 600 of those jobs, and that number will grow slightly.
Twenty-four hundred employees are journalists: editors, reporters,
photographers, camera operators. Not stringers. Full-timers, on
payroll, with benefits. Reuters has 197 bureaus serving 130 countries.
“What surprises me is that no one knows that the news business is
less than 10 percent of our revenue,” Grossman says.
But she’s not complaining. Asked if there’s anything amiss when
15 percent of the company’s work force generates one-tenth its revenue,
she says, “No, that’s fine. It’s brand equity for Reuters as the
premier information company in the world.”
After enunciating key points about its undertakings (and defending
the staffing levels and profitability of the world’s largest international
multimedia news agency), she wonders aloud at what Reuters accomplishes
day in, day out: “It’s fascinating. We’re gathering data on more
than 960,000 financial instruments, and it’s updated 8,000 times
a second.”
|
“All
of our people are very talented,” Grossman says. “I’m
very proud of how they’ve tackled the changes they’ve
faced in the last 18 months.” |
|
Clearly there’s a whole lot of transacting going on, and financial
professionals—500,000 of them in 52,900 locations—are Reuters users.
These are mostly institutional investors, making decisions, say,
for a pension fund or mutual fund; or commodity traders; or investment
bankers; or financial advisors and retail brokers.
What they see on the screen—Grossman calls it development’s “front
end interface”—relies on Thomas’ work on the back end, “how to get
it there, how one source provides hundreds of thousands of financial
users worldwide with the information they need.”
The task seems daunting to a layman, particularly in view of the
complexity of the data, the proliferation of sources, the proliferation
of users, and the needs and demands of users.
When Grossman says, “Develop- ment is full of really intelligent
software developers, the chief architects for our products,” these
are the people she is talking about.
Internationally, Thomas oversees 325 employees, with 115 in St.
Louis. Work continues in St. Paul, Minn., and Long Island, although
New Yorkers will migrate mostly to here and Kansas City.
“We’ve been very active in filling positions, adding on the order
of 35-to-40 positions at the St. Louis campus, and 25-to-30 in Kansas
City this year,” Thomas says.
The jobs pay well, he adds, but wouldn’t hint how many salaries
were close to or more than six- figures. The total annual direct
and indirect impact of Rueters on the St. Louis region is $115 million
annually. Reuters employs approximately 600 people in St. Louis,
and those 545 jobs support another 673 jobs in greater St. Louis,
for a total annual employment impact of 1,145.
What he did point to is that his people love their jobs: “This kind
of work isn’t available everywhere. It’s compelling, and an energetic
place to work. We’re serving several hundred thousand Type A personalities
who demand that the system work at a high performance level 7 by
24.”
The joy.
Besides software development, Thomas also oversees “quality assurance
functions around the technical assets that Reuters acquired from
Bridge.”
Thomas’ group works with a variety of machines (“On the edges lots
of Win-Tel, and centrally DEC alpha running OpenVMS,” he mentions
casually) and software (“SUNSparcs and heavily used Sybase technology”).
Then, mercifully, he switches to shirt-sleeve English: “Our meat
and potatoes is our interface to sources of information and users
of information.” He enumerates the sources: “400 exchange feeds;
and a similar number of third party user feeds (other news agencies);
and a couple of thousand contributing firms and banks, with their
data about such things as exchange rates.
“That data is brought into St. Louis for processing and storage—archiving—and
then we distribute that over our own wide area network to several
hundred thousand users, on a global basis.”
More Thomas: “About 100,000 of them are high-end clients, professional
clients who use premium service in both the desktop and data-feed
environment. They need deep data to make money institutionally.
These are not individuals monitoring their portfolios.
“The complexity on the user side multiplies when you include web
users, say, an investment firm who provides our information to their
retail users,” he says.
Then there’s the other key focus of his work: directing the group
who is developing Reuters’ single-product platform.
When Thomas talks about it, he conveys one point explicitly—the
benefits of the project are enormous for Reuters and customers alike—and
one impression implicitly: he’s really excited to have work that
is this challenging.
“By having purchased these Bridge assets,” he says, “Reuters had
parallel assets that are still in use today in somewhat different
markets, with somewhat different strengths and weaknesses.”
Bridge was strong in U.S. equity markets, he explains, and Reuters
is the leader in international money markets and foreign exchange
trading data.
And as salubrious as the synergies may have been, the buyout also
illustrates why a company founded in 1851 that grows to annual revenues
in excess of $5.1 billion might occasionally need to blow out the
cobwebs.
“Over time,” Thomas says, “Reuters collected hundreds of systems
and dozens of architectures that expose our total capabilities to
clients in far too many ways.”
For instance, Reuters has had eight price history databases. Each
can be accessed several different ways and the data overlaps. So
with computers as powerful as they are nowadays, wouldn’t it be
cheaper to just add a few more high-powered machines?
No.
“Different classes of users, or if you’ve got a firm with multiple
Reuters services, people within the same organization might get
to the same information that’s stored in different places through
different products that do largely the same thing,” Thomas says.
“But the information, coming from different databases might not
be identical.”
Think of the problems that could create for internal debates relying
on pie charts.
“At the end of the exercise, we’ll have one coherent history, a
uniform database with a comprehensive access mechanism that will
be the same for all users,” Thomas says. “We’ll reduce the expense
of running parallel systems, as well as provide the ability to build
products that leverage common code bases.”
In other words, the combination of products that users can purchase
will no longer be limited by the dictates of a particular tool’s
heritage.
The bottom line for customers, Thomas says, is “We’ll be doing everything
once instead of the same thing a number of times. We’ll be offering
higher quality service with more options at a lower price.”
The third critical operational node in St. Louis—the customer relationship
management center—is led by senior vice president Martin Brading.
He comes to St. Louis from London.
Company briefing materials say the CRMC “is a central point of contact
for clients in the Americas to resolve data, functionality, and
technical issues related to Reuters information services and software
products. Working closely with other Reuters groups, divisions and
subsidiaries as well as external vendors, the CRMC aims to render
timely and effective resolution to clients.”
“The migration of the CRMC people and assets is taking place in
four stages,” Grossman says. “Phase three started in late March.
Phase four starts in June.”
“All of our people are very talented,” Grossman says. “I’m very
proud of how they’ve tackled the changes they’ve faced in the last
18 months.
“In addition to the professional development opportunities we are
providing the area, we will also bring in an international element,”
Grossman continues. “Reuters moving into St. Louis has resulted
in a cross-pollination of business talent and cultural experience
that not only help St. Louis employees better prepare for the needs
of an increasingly global work environment, but Reuters presence
in St. Louis also provides a model to other companies seeking to
appeal to markets outside of domestic borders.”
Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services and community
relations firm in St. Charles.
|
|
|
|
|
-
- - - - -
- - - - -
- - - - -
- -
-
- - - - -
- - - - -
- - - - -
- -
-
- - - - -
- - - - -
- - - - -
- -
-
- - - - -
- - - - -
- - - - -
- -
|
