Credit Suisse First Boston and Relegence have jointly created a new data product, called Relegence Connect, available exclusively to CSFB’s high-end buy-side clients. CSFB’s global head of equity research first conceived the idea for the product, which allows users to link breaking news to proprietary CSFB knowledge about market relationships in real-time.

Specifically, the idea came about when Stefano Natella, CSFB’s global head of equity research, mentioned that when important market news breaks, he’d like a way to more quickly tap into the knowledge that CSFB and its analysts had about the interconnectedness of different companies, said Edo Segal, Relegence’s founder and CTO. So for example, if important news broke about a company like Ford or IBM, it’s helpful to be able to see quickly which suppliers, customers or other companies might be dependent on the company in the news, as well as the degree to which these other companies could potentially be affected by the breaking news.

“The idea is that if something happens to Cisco, by the time it happens it’s already factored into the price of the stock. But who will this affect? Who are the customers, suppliers, equity holders?” Segal said. “Much of this is a manual process – either the trader remembers, or they call an analyst or someone shouts it on the hoot and holler.”

Relegence, a .NET-based company, basically built a database of all the market relationship knowledge that CSFB had, and made it graphical so that users would be able to see the relationships instantly. In one of the screen views for example, arrows go from the company being queried to all its suppliers, customers and relationship partners, and the thickness of the arrow indicates the extent to which other companies are dependent on the queried company. Furthermore, users can click on partner companies and quickly see the relationships that the partner companies have. Contact information for the analysts that cover the companies or the sector are also listed on the screen.

Another screen view, set up to look more like email, contains headlines of the queried company at the top of the screen, and headlines from partner companies at the bottom of the screen, along with heat indicators so that viewers can quickly see which queried companies are making important news.

The product is used internally at CSFB and will be offered by Relegence as a Relegence product to a select group of CSFB clients. CSFB’s Natella was satisfied with the result, calling it “A unique tool that will help analysts think more laterally and understand better and faster the implications of news flow.”

“We look forward to offering this powerful product to our buy-side clients,” he said.

Relegence was an early adopter of .NET and its back end is .NET driven, Segal said.