Nothing up the sleeve
The Bloomberg Professional Services Terminal (aka Bloomberg Terminal) was released in the early 80’s and has been evolving and thriving ever since. Anyone who used the Terminal back in the early days would certainly recognise it in its current modern form. Whilst it’s a Microsoft Windows based application, it has carved out a unique user-experience (UX) that has been popular with more than 325,000 users since inception. It has that very distinctive orange on black branding and has bucked the UI Windows style of menus to access features. This is not out of arrogance but is there to support access to the vastness of value available in the Bloomberg ecosystem, something no menu system could ever accommodate. Instead, it provides a command line interface (CLI) for the ever-growing repertoire of features.
The Terminal provides access to real-time updating and static reference information across the entire spectrum of asset classes, supported with analytics, graphs, order entry, news, email, messaging (Instant Bloomberg), ad infinitum. In some respects, it is the portal/window into all the information and services that sit in Bloomberg central but for the more technology astute, it is a powerful thin-client into a set of microservices. It is, without a doubt, an under-estimated piece of technological wizardry. It means that at any time, Bloomberg can release new or enhanced features and functions, refine existing ones, all without skipping a beat. No mass software updates, no downtime, and customers in the nicest possible way, ignorant that any of this is going on.
But wait a minute, if these microservices reside back at Bloomberg central (the mothership), surely there must be ways of accessing this other than the Terminal. Here’s where the magic begins. Back in the late 2000’s, Bloomberg created an Application Programming Interface (API), creatively called The Bloomberg API (BLP API), that was specifically designed to access these microservices. The API on the surface appears simple and completely decoupled from any specific microservice giving it the appearance of being dumb and smart all at the same time.
In simple terms, it supports a pattern of; create a session to one or more delivery points, access one or more microservices, perform functions (there are only four) and then you’re done. Sounds simple, and, it is. The beauty is that as soon as you access a microservice, the BLP API downloads the metadata that determines the microservice’s capability and heh presto, you’re empowered. As an example, you could access the streaming data service (called mktdata), subscribe to Vodafone on the LSE, and seconds later you’re getting Level 1 updates.
So, to exploit the Terminal and extract more value from it, your first point of call is to launch the Terminal and silently it will create a single delivery point[1]. Soon after, you could write an application largely using a language of your choice, eg Python, create a session to this delivery point, access one of the dozen microservices and create your own piece of magic.
In future articles, we’ll see how you can take this paradigm much further, with the flexibility to start small or think extreme and take your business to the next level.
If you can’t wait, or need some help discussing application architecture, or how to get the most out of your Bloomberg ecosystem, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here at Sherpa Consultancy.
[1] known by a few names, such as bbcomm (/be-be-comm/), DAPI (/ dapp-ee/) and Desktop API.
