Thomson Reuters Snaps Up News Analytics Partner Intellectual Property

Author: Max Bowie

Inside Market Data | 10 Oct 2011 | 03:25

Category: alliances, mergers & acquisitions | Data Display & Analytics

Tags: Thomson reuters | Analytics | Sentiment

Thomson Reuters has bought out the intellectual property behind its News Analytics service from its developer, Amherst, Mass.-based Lexalytics, for an undisclosed sum, to give it full control over the solution as interest in unstructured data grows, officials say.

The IP behind the service was originally developed by Infonic, which merged with Lexalytics in 2008. As a result of the deal, some Lexalytics staff have also joined Thomson Reuters, though the vendor has not acquired the company outright, which will continue to offer its other product line, text analysis solutions for brand management. Lexalytics officials could not be reached for comment by press time.

“This was a general brand management system until we got involved, but we then worked with Lexalytics to train that system to understand financial services… and developed real-time capabilities for customer environments, a hosted service within Elektron and snapshot capabilities in DataScope Select,” says Rich Brown, global business manager for machine-readable news at Thomson Reuters. “The more specific it got, and the more data we put into it, the more we were making it our own product with significant competitive differentiators. We wanted to own that capability and leverage it more widely.”

Brown says the move will not impact existing clients, but that the main changes will come as the vendor applies the technology to other areas of its business. He says the vendor already has an “aggressive” roadmap of new capabilities based on News Analytics, with some “likely to be released this quarter” once it has processed the required historical data.

News Analytics could also be applied to products from the former “Professional” division of Thomson Reuters, including its legal and healthcare businesses, which could benefit from analytics relating to litigation or drug trials, respectively, Brown says. However, he adds, “We don’t have everything in-house, so being able to get other sources of data and integrate them into our systems is key. In some cases, we are partnering with other companies, and there will be some interesting capabilities around how we source data for this in future… both from inside and outside Thomson Reuters.”

Separately, Thomson Reuters last week announced plans to roll out a market data distribution platform for exchanges in the first half of next year, dubbed Enterprise Platform for Exchanges (EPX), based on the same technology as its Elektron global data infrastructure and Enterprise Platform for Real Time data platform.

Terry Roche, global head of Elektron real-time and Enterprise Platform at Thomson Reuters, says the vendor can demonstrate the platform today, which can be delivered as a full-function turnkey solution or as an a-la-carte menu of capabilities, including those for calculating indexes, and the vendor’s DACS entitlements tool.

“More exchanges are... under pressure to grow their data distribution and maximize the value of their data offerings,” Roche says, adding that the platform will appeal to developed markets that need to update their infrastructures and emerging markets seeking to attract more liquidity.

Thomson Reuters already provides a data distribution platform based on the Enterprise Platform for Bursa Malaysia (IMD, Dec. 14, 2009).