S-O-B Shades of Blue

Het Financieele Dagblad

A financial newspaper

The leading Dutch financial newspaper was transformed from a single paper version to a multimedia publisher of financial information. Any piece of content is made available for electronic (re-)distribution -including the internet-, without additional handling: just choose the means of publishing and it is done, once or permanently, all or a selection.

Besides the paper based core, also real-time newswires were implemented , both incoming and outgoing. The last was a challenge: there is no system standard in the world,  a system was build based on Microsoft exchange which worked very satisfying.

We also took care of implementation of a new editorial system. Also here automation of repeating processes was key: the pages with the daily stock quotes were at the delivery of the implementation fully automated. And brought down from a 4 hour process to a 30 minutes.

The commercial systems ran on VAX-VMS systems, with quite outdated character interfaces. The technology was not supported anymore. A selection process was initiated to replace these systems. Two suppliers ended in a knock down challenge, which was won by SAP.