DATA LINK GOES DOWN, TECHNICIANS HIT THE ROOF: MONEY MANAGERS IN THE DARK WHEN SATELLITE LEFT ITS ORBIT

“We don’t normally get out on the roof and manipulate the satellite dish,” says Scott Turvey, vice president for systems and networking at Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management Inc. in San Diego.

But that’s just what his staff had to do when hundreds of traders and portfolio managers went without critical information after a satellite lost its way.

Most attention focused on the lost messages for millions of pagers when PanAmSat’s Galaxy IV spun out of control May 19. But Galaxy IV also carried data, news and research feeds for some of the world’s leading financial information providers.

The Nicholas-Applegate techs went to great lengths — actually heights — climbing to the roof of the 500-foot, 34-story One America Plaza, one of San Diego’s tallest buildings, to aim a couple of dishes at Galaxy VI, which also carried the lost feeds. They were able to restore contact with the data and research information services Reuters and First Call.

Oy, veh!

Nicholas-Applegate wasn’t the only one with satellite woes.

l Data Transmission Network in Omaha, Neb., lost communications for its 157,000 clients.

l About 1,400 clients of S&P Comstock temporarily lost their market quote feed.

l PC Quote Inc. of Chicago, a real-time market data provider, temporarily lost contact with 500 clients.

l Crestar Asset Management of Richmond, Va., was one of 26 clients to lose Instinet’s Research Analytics for a couple of days.

Money managers aren’t happy without access to their favorite data sources. Kevin Dillon, group manager of product support at Nicholas-Applegate, says getting real-time feeds is “extremely important.”

“It’s where you see real-time information about what the market is doing. If you are a money manager, you want to watch securities, particularly ones you are holding.” Watching a real-time feed “would be particularly important on a company that was tanking,” Mr. Dillon says.

Nicholas-Applegate technicians decided to brave the roof when they heard it might be a week before one vendor could re-target satellite dishes to a working satellite.

But they rose to the challenge: Technicians were told they had to point their dishes four degrees to the east of their current target.

“For all intents and purposes, we eyeballed it, (and) we began to get a clean feed in the (computer) server room,” Mr. Turvey says.

At First Call in Boston, some clients also took matters into their own hands, even though the firm sent technicians to retarget satellite dishes, says spokeswoman Faye Fardshisheh.

Not everyone else managed to realign dishes, and many information services were discouraging clients from climbing on buildings.

Some firms’ technicians “moved dishes around too much,” gripes Linda Grunberg, a spokeswoman at Data Transmission Network, and for a while, at least, couldn’t re-establish communications.

She says 157,000 of her clients were affected by the satellite and lost communication. But only a fraction of the news and data service’s clients are financial firms; 80% are agricultural clients.

At S&P Comstock, some clients that temporarily lost their quote feed immediately switched to dial-up services, says Daniel Connell, president, but “the vast majority did not.”

His staff called all 1,400 clients twice to offer support and answer questions, telling them they could access the service over the Internet, particularly through Comstock’s new Xpresso Internet service. An estimated 400 to 500 did so. Comstock had re-oriented satellite dishes for about 900 clients by May 24.

At Reuters, where less than 10% of clients received information by satellite via its VSAT, service was restored to all but a couple within two days, says spokesman Robert Crooke.

Richard Shenkman, an executive vice president at Instinet Corp. in New York, says 26 of its many clients lost service because of the satellite. Service was restored to 12 the next morning and to the rest the following day. Most clients, using 1,500 terminals, use land lines for the service.

Crain News Service