Bloomberg

Bloomberg is the leading global source of data, analytics and news. Each day, more than 260,000 financial professionals rely on a range of high-quality information services inside 200,000 Bloomberg Terminals worldwide.

With every Bloomberg Terminal costing $1900 a month, the value to Bloomberg of displacing competitive terminals and extending existing client accounts with ongoing functionality enhancements is material to the company's bottom line and business strategy.

Bloomberg takes advantage of IDOL and related Autonomy technologies including K2 to grow its business by helping users make more informed investment decisions even faster. Autonomy replaced basic keyword search and manual classification across Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Messages, as well as facilitating new product offerings such as Bloomberg Healthcare and a number of internal applications.

High Performance and Extreme Scalability

Speed and size matter in Bloomberg's world. Financial professionals can move the markets with fast access to the breaking news available from the Bloomberg Terminal. Autonomy's unique ability to scale to a massive volume of users and information without sacrificing performance is demonstrated in many ways across Bloomberg's information service offerings:

• Autonomy indexes a library of 120 million articles in 12 languages inside Bloomberg News and more than 200,000 articles are added on a daily basis
• Search response times are guaranteed at sub 100 milliseconds, according to Autonomy/Bloomberg service level agreements
• Autonomy indexes six million messages every day inside the company's proprietary email system at Bloomberg Messages
• During peak periods, such as 9 a.m. ET, as many as 1,000 emails are sent every second by Bloomberg users. With Autonomy, those messages are searchable on the system within five seconds.
• All Bloomberg messages are retained and searchable for a period of 50 working days
• The hardware requirements for Autonomy to scale to these loads are standard: Bloomberg uses commodity Linux boxes.

Meaning Based Information Processing

Bloomberg deploys a number of Autonomy's most advanced capabilities to support Bloomberg's user base with the analysis of news, information, events and companies.

Real-time Scrolling News: Autonomy enables Bloomberg users to set up agents to monitor information 24/7 on specific concepts. Every time a story matches the criteria, Autonomy populates the news in real-time across a user's computer screen. Autonomy powers 1.26 million trading alerts every day, demonstrating the value of this feature for Bloomberg's user base.

Cluster Visualization: Autonomy's Cluster Visualization technology serves to streamline equity research by visually depicting the intensity of news coverage about companies, indexes, sectors and geographies, relative to the level of coverage normally received. The Heat Maps, as Bloomberg calls them, give users visibility into burning topics, trends and areas that require more or less attention in their portfolios.

Headline Clustering: Autonomy reads through all of Bloomberg's news stories in real-time, identifying clusters of related coverage from different sources and automatically collapsing result sets to prevent information overload. At the same time, Autonomy ensures that the full range of information sources is available if required.

Automatic Classification: Autonomy classifies every piece of content from Bloomberg and non-Bloomberg sources into a 2.1 million node taxonomy. The content is automatically classified with rules conceptually created by IDOL which has reduced the need for Bloomberg editors to manually tag articles for classification.

Innovation

The competitive landscape that Bloomberg competes in is fierce. To build market share against rivals, Bloomberg is committed to extending functionality in the information services across the organization on an ongoing basis.

The enhancements include:

Instant Messages: "Instant Bloomberg," the instant messaging service for Bloomberg users will be added to the IDOL index.

Greater Scale: The Bloomberg email system will expand its retention of messages from 50 working days to one year. This translates to a searchable archive of 1.5 billion messages with the same Autonomy/ Bloomberg SLAs in effect.

Bloomberg Law: IDOL will replace an Oracle Text search engine installation that failed to scale without significant increases in costly hardware.

Bloomberg Pharmaceuticals: IDOL's Directed Navigation capabilities will be rolled out on this yet-to-be launched Bloomberg service for pharmaceutical data.

Bloomberg Television: Bloomberg is currently exploring Autonomy's conceptual video and audio search for the company's 10 television networks.