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Strategies & Market Trends : Trend Setters and Range Riders -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sam_o who wrote (4250)	4/18/2001 10:30:01 PM
From: janie	Respond to of 5732

Sam, I'm probably not the one you should talk to about it since I've only used it one day, but it's similar to qcharts. It doesn't have alot of the neat stuff that they have like Moneyflow, %in range, most-ups, sorting capabilities, but I can live without it just so that it's reliable. There's a free download that you could try until you get used to the charts, etc...if you're apprehensive. Here's the site again(I think someone posted it earlier): nextrend.com Good luck! Janie

To: sam_o who wrote (4250)	4/18/2001 10:53:33 PM
From: Susan G	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5732

The phone lines must have been on fire today.... they sure outdid themselves in providing the worst service in Qcharts history today. And of all days for it to be horrid. Important Quote.com Update Firstly, I'd like to thank you for your patronage and apologize for the recent performance issues. We have dedicated all of our Continuum resources to resolve the current performance and reliability problems that exist with our QCharts service. Due largely to the increased volume generated by the decimalization of the exchanges, we have hit a hurdle with Continuum's ability to scale during highly active markets or when operational issues otherwise disrupt the service. We are in the middle of a focused project to permanently resolve these issues which is the number one priority within the Lycos Finance Vertical. The purpose of this project is to scale Continuum to handle the increase in data flow due to decimalization, to improve the performance of the servers and to increase the reliability of our service. We will see the bulk of these benefits delivered over the next two weeks. There will also be an ongoing effort to further enhance the architecture of Continuum to meet the increased demand for data, reliability and performance from this product. This effort will address the many issues that we are currently experiencing within the demand for our service. What has been done: 1) Over the past month we have made marked improvements in the performance capacity of out Quote services. The benefits of these enhancements have unfortunately been negated by the tremendous increase in data being handled by the servers caused by decimalization. The increased volume of bid/ask data being sent by the exchanges due to decimalization requires approximately FOUR times as much data to be processed by our servers. 2) Increased staffing on the Continuum development team, supporting the QCharts product line, allows us to execute faster on these performance issues. What's coming up: 1) An additional Continuum Server farm will be spun up within three weeks. This will increase capacity by approximately 50%. 2) Incremental performance, scalability and reliability improvements will be released over the next two months, starting this weekend. These additional enhancements will not be counteracted by sudden increases in data as they have in the past, although we do expect continued natural gradual increase of data flow. 3) We have engaged a new Director of Client Services, who will be tasked with improving the level of support and communication within our customer base. This we believe will assist us to enhance service levels as the changes are introduced. 4) We are looking into the pricing of our services to insure that heaviest consumers of data are paying their way without impacting the majority of consumers who use our service. We are seeing a minority of customers requesting large volumes of data, which is being served at the same rate that we charge the normal user of QCharts. This is inherently unfair on the majority of our customers and we intend to address this imbalance. 5) We will be addressing an immediate issue with the volume of option data that is being drawn by a small percentage of our customers, which is impacting our ability to deliver quote data to large bulk of our customers. This will be in the form of a filter that will throttle our delivery of options bid/ask data only during heavy market sessions. This will insure that we meet the needs of the majority, whilst protecting the availability and performance of our service. 6) We will be embarking on a plan that will prevent users from needing to switch between servers. In the past, this has led to tremendous difficulty for us to balance the farms and you, the customer, end up with a service level that is far below expectation. We are telling you of our intention to do this up front, because we believe that you pay us to manage the overall service. We hope that you understand our position. Once this change is rolled out it will allow us to deliver a significantly improved level of service. We apologies for the length of time that it has taken to address the numerous questions that were raised over the last two days, as it was important that we investigated the root cause of the issues encountered. In the event that you have any questions related to the above, please feel free to contact client services at Quote.com who will be able to assist you. We appreciate your patronage and are working hard to provide you with the best level of service at a very affordable price. Regards, Steven Killeen President Terra Lycos(US)