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31. Reuters

• Head of IT: None at present
• Industry: Financial services
• Website: www.reuters.co.uk

No sooner had the information services company, Reuters announced the results of a successful three-year business recovery programme, than it had new challenges to keep it busy.

In May 2007, UK-based Reuters agreed to merge with one of the world’s largest information companies, the Thomson Corporation in a deal valued at $17.2 billion (£8.7 billion). Canadian firm, Thomson now controls about 53 per cent of the new company, named Thomson Reuters. The merger completed in April and combines Thomson’s market strengths in North America and Reuters’ dominance in Europe, the Middles East and Asia.

The IT function was one year into a three-year IT consolidation programme designed to provide it with a leading edge platform so that it can perform as a service broker, rather than as an application developer or supplier. One such example of the programme at work was an original equipment manufacture (OEM) agreement with network latency and monitoring vendor Endace to supply information on data delivery service levels to its financial services clients.

And late last year, the firm went live with a four-year, £20-million support services contract with Computacenter Services in the UK. The infrastructure support services are designed to underpin its ongoing cost control and customer service level improvements and were announced less than a month after the awarding of a £500-million managed IT infrastructure services contract to Fujitsu.

Part of the Reuters stated strategic goals is to become market leaders in electronic trading and technology products for financial services companies and services for new markets. “We are creating neutral, scaleable, open trading platforms to be used by both people and machines,” the company stated.

But the company faces new challenges and goals without David Lister, its CIO who joined Reuters in 2006 from Boots. Lister left Reuters in April 2008 to embark on a similarly large IT transformation project at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Reuters had made no comment at the time of writing on his successor.

For more news on Reuters, visit www.cio.co.uk

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