Tom Glocer on Eikon: You too can make it sing

Glocer and the Cass dean, chief operating officer Alex Fraser, pictured, cut an orange ribbon in the new Thomson Reuters zone at the school which is decorated in the company’s orange livery.

“With the previous products it took a huge amount of training to make it sing,” Glocer said. Eikon, by contrast, uses new tools like web-style navigation and social networking. “You can do what I do; just play with it and explore,” Glocer said.

The zone initially has just one Eikon terminal with some data on a 15-minute delay but a separate room at the school with 3000 Xtra workstations, which Eikon replaces, is set to be converted later. A further room at the school has Bloomberg machines.

A Thomson Reuters trainer showed highlights of Eikon - marketed with the slogan “New era. New tools” - to a small group. He stressed that there was no need to set up and save sheets, as with 3000 Xtra, though this function is available. He showed how easy it was to click between user-friendly displays of news, data and graphs and import data into Excel. The trainer joked that it was likely to put trainers out of work.

The first Cass student to use the terminal, who was familiar with Bloomberg, said he found Eikon much friendlier because of the familiar web-style links.

A Thomson Reuters salesman said privately that converting clients would be a major focus for the sales force in the next three years. Although clients do not pay extra for Eikon, many have complex systems of their own with which it needs to be integrated, he said. ■