IN BRIEF

Bridge Information systems, provider of financial information services, will be offering customers on-site capacity testing and assessment so they may optimize their preparation for the decimalization of equities trading. The testing is conducted on customers' servers through Bridge's Multiplier Device, which multiplies a customers' stream of data flow up to five times its current rate. Bridge is meeting the decimalization demands on its own system by using the Bridge Collection System--a technology that is fully scalable and allows for high-capacity expansion in a relatively short time.

American Century, an investment management company, has chosen software by Arbortext, a provider of Extensible Markup Language (XML), as the format on which to build a variety of investment product offerings. American Century will make use of Arbortext's Epic solution--using Epic, Arbortext's XML-based companies, like American Century, are able to automate the delivery of more types of personalized information to their customers in a variety of formats over different types of media. Epic provides the ability to deliver business-critical content by streamlining the conversion and capture of content into XML.

Nasdaq plans to start its pilot program for conversion to decimal notation on August 28. The conversion will continue with a series of coordinated phases, culminating with all stocks and options prices and traded in decimals by April 2001. The decision to convert to decimals is part of an industry-wide effort to make securities pricing and trading easier for all consumers to understand. Additionally, analysts say the public will save millions of dollars a year when they are able to trade in finer increments. The NASD, SEC, NYSE and SIA have all developed educational materials for investors to explain the conversion process.