Dataworks Enterprise was originally conceived and developed by a small company called "The
One Software Company Ltd", more commonly known as "Tosca". Tosca was a small
financial software consultancy and had three employees who had previously
worked for Dow Jones Markets, Reuters, Totem, Kapiti, etc. In the first instance, the idea was to produce a front office publishing system
that could publish data to market data distribution systems (MDDS). Front
office publishing is quite a complex task involving Office and MDDS
integration. At the time (1998), there were very few of these systems in place
and the ones that were used were often poor in implementation. In principle, these publishing systems have software at user workstations take
data, often from MS Office applications, and send it to a central server or
servers for redistribution using the bank's MDDS. Banks would use the system to
publish in-house analysis onto the distribution system, for their front office
traders to use. The data would be integrated at the trader workstation with
third-party data such as quotes and news. This software was substantially finished around the turn of 1999-2000 and Tosca
set about the task of trying to sell the product to its customers, i.e. banks. In the meanwhile, a significant interest had been shown in Dataworks Enterprise by a number
of the market data vendors and other third-parties. There were a number of factors that caused this. Firstly, Dataworks Enterprise could
integrate well with Web technology and many vendors were looking to "beef up"
their web solutions. Also, at the time, there were a significant number of
acquisitions taking place in the financial information market place and
Dataworks Enterprise's ability to quickly integrate disparate data sources became more
significant to these vendors. Late in 1999, Primark acquired the software and the Tosca developers joined TFS.
Primark brought in additional development staff to the group and tasked them with making all
Thomson data available through Dataworks Enterprise, and to use it as a single consolidated
API to that data. The product has been variously named since being owned by Thomson. Among the
more common are MDP, PDP, Silverback (actually this was something quite
different), and the "Press". In 2003 the name was changed to Dataworks Enterprise, and the rest, as they say, is history.A Brief History of Dataworks Enterprise