President, Enterprise
Thomson Reuters
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Technology has had a transformative effect on Thomson Reuters — not a surprise for a venerable news and financial data organization. But the company is no longer just reacting to technological change. It is a trailblazer in its own right with Elektron, a two-year-old “managed cloud” network that is driving growth for the $1.4 billion-in-revenue enterprise unit headed by Jon Robson. A shared infrastructure for high-frequency trading and other functions requiring expansive capacity and speed, Elektron is open to virtually any market participant or service supplier. It so “changes the way our world works,” says London-based Robson, that it transcends the cloud computing paradigm. “We were historically a centralized organization for publishing data,” he explains. “This transforms us into a market fabric.” To Robson, 52, whose fixed-income systems company Moneyline Telerate was acquired by Reuters Group in 2004, Elektron is an ever-evolving, “app-store-like” community. Clients and suppliers — recent additions include trading automation firm Portware and StreamBase Systems (see Mark Palmer, No. 40) — interact with one another and with Thomson Reuters’s data and analytics. The network effect spawns new business opportunities, Robson says, and the shared architecture helps products get to market faster and cheaper.
