Not Camelot, . . still a round table

I listened to the trailing 30 minutes of this roundtable discussion and highly recommend tuning in . . .While it's clear there are a growing number of firms vying for the attention of the SEC as they seduce the marketplace into adopting interactive data, Cox spoke very succinctly and clearly for perhaps the very first time when asked the pointed questions "what is the timetable for transitioning to interactive data."

So, it's now public news that a top exec from Morgan Stanley has left to head up MSN Money, presumably to take his learnings in information mining and tagging from the big time insitutional investors to the big time retail investors via the Microsoft portal. Hmm.

The software vendor community was represented by the usual suspects: Lipper, Enumerate Solutions, Sun MicroSystems, NASDAQ, EdgarOnline, Hitachi, SavaNet, and Rivet talking about their tools and strategy for each of their organizations. While the talk was fluid, it lacked the big commercial drivers for market adoption. . . a compelling+immediate+benefit. Methinks, this motley bunch of evangelists will change hats (or disappear) at least a few times before one or two major players enter the market (such as GOOG, AMZN or EBAY).

Cox clearly wants the interactive data train to be well on its way as a legacy he leaves behind and his lasting fingerprint on the regulation of the capital markets before moving onto greener pastures as he remarked that the SEC has now committed funding to the program to be implemented and, once the taxonomy development work is complete, the SEC will be in a much better position to weigh the issuer implementation options (staged or selective by industry) against the burden of existing reporting.

I think he's finally caught the attention and imagination of the software vendor community and by reflecting on the report by a F500 CEO complementing the smooth transition to XBRL he may even have caught the attention of issuers watching nervously on the sidelines.