Bloomberg

What is Bloomberg?

Bloomberg is a major global provider of 24-hour financial news and information, including real-time and historic price data, financials data, trading news, and analyst coverage, as well as general news and sports. Its services, which span its own platform, television, radio, and magazines, offer professional analysis tools for financial professionals. One of Bloomberg's key revenue earners is the Bloomberg Terminal, which is an integrated platform that streams together price data, financials, news, and trading data to more than 300,000 customers worldwide.

Basics of Bloomberg

Bloomberg was founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981 as a technology provider of financial analytics and information. The company started with its flagship Bloomberg Terminal and saw itself grow to over 10,000 installed units within its first 10 years of operation. It subsequently built off its success by implementing Bloomberg News, an international financial news provider. Subscriptions for the news source grew to 150,000 over the proceeding 10 years, and the company then launched Bloomberg Tradebook, allowing people to trade directly through Bloomberg. As of 2018, the company is made up of financial products, enterprise products, industry products, and media services.

Since its inception, Bloomberg has grown to become one of the most important financial companies in the world. It has over 325,000 subscriptions to its professional services, almost 1 million global circulations of Bloomberg Businessweek and over 150 news bureaus internationally. The number of subscribers to its terminals has declined only twice — the first time was after the financial crisis, and the second time was in 2016.

The Bloomberg Terminal

The iconic Bloomberg Terminal, also known as the Bloomberg Professional Service, is a software system and computer interface that gives financial professionals the ability to track and analyze breaking news across the globe. The Bloomberg Terminal is geared toward large, institutional investors, and facilitates communication, information, and trades between institutions. The average customer pays upwards of $20,000 per year for the service.

To support this massive network of financial information, data encryption, messaging, and trading, Bloomberg employs over 4,000 computer engineers around the globe. These engineers make daily tweaks and improvements to the Bloomberg Professional Service so it continues to provide the most comprehensive array of financial capabilities open to the general public.

Bloomberg actively stays ahead of the technology curve by implementing aspects of current tech trends, such as its adoption of open-source technologies like Hadoop big-data framework and Solar search platform. In May 2015, Bloomberg opened up a technology hub in San Francisco, moving the majority of its engineers away from its New York headquarter offices. The company hopes this will allow it to acquire and retain top engineering talent and help it continue to deliver the highest level of technological capabilities to its Bloomberg Professional Service customers.