Wharton Research Data Services Reaches New Milestone: 100 Institutional Subscribers Worldwide.

Business Editors

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 15, 2004

With the announcement today of its 100th institutional subscriber, Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) solidifies its position as the de facto standard for quantitative business research.

WRDS offers a comprehensive, web-based data management system that allows faculty, students and researchers to easily retrieve information from a wide variety of financial, economic, and marketing data sources, and is recognized around the world by the academic and financial research community as the must-have business intelligence tool. WRDS delivers approximately 1.5 terabytes of research data from 19 vendor partners, including Compustat, CRSP, comScore and Thomson Financial Services.

Originally developed in 1993 by the Wharton School as an internal resource for Wharton faculty, since 1997 WRDS has been available to other schools and non-profit research organizations through an application service provider (ASP) model hosted at the Wharton School. In recent years, subscription growth has accelerated as business school faculty and their students have come to rely increasingly on WRDS for all aspects of empirical research. WRDS is considered particularly indispensable in PhD programs at the top business schools. WRDS has expanded worldwide both in terms of international subscriber base and in its offerings of international data, which include databases from Bureau van Dijk and Global Insight.

"Stanford has greatly benefited from WRDS," said Maureen McNichols, Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which was WRDS' first customer. "WRDS is superior to any set up a school can provide for itself. It provides easy access to the most important databases, and the technical support has always been timely and informed. Wharton provides a great service."

Vanderbilt University is the 100th WRDS subscriber. Paul Chaney, Associate Professor from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University said, "Vanderbilt's acquisition of WRDS was primarily motivated by a desire to increase the efficiency of our researchers." According to Professor Chaney, "Before WRDS, supporting personnel were needed to upgrade and maintain numerous databases, different faculty members served as contact sources for different databases, and everyone spent considerable time writing programs just to access and retrieve data. The acquisition of WRDS eliminates all of these inefficiencies and allows our researchers and staff to focus on data analysis rather than data acquisition." As a specific example, Professor Chaney said, "I recently started a new project and obtained CRSP equity prices through WRDS within minutes, when previously I could spend an afternoon of frustration trying to debug a customized program to retrieve the same data."

By turning a cost center into a cost-recovery opportunity, WRDS started a trend within Wharton to share knowledge outside of the Wharton community by building on technology innovations on campus. Wharton launched the bi-weekly e-zine Knowledge@Wharton in 1999 featuring timely business stories and the latest research from Wharton faculty. Knowledge@Wharton now has more than 300,000 subscribers. And in 2003, Wharton began marketing OTIS, an Online Trading and Investment Simulator that allows students to buy and sell equities using real-world market data (without risking real money), to business school students throughout the United States through an agreement with Pearson Addison-Wesley.

In 2001, WRDS received a patent on technology for its unique method of managing user accounts and data access privileges. In 2003, WRDS was the recipient of the highly coveted Enterprise Value Award from CIO Magazine and the Computerworld Honors Laureate Award for "visionary use of information technology."

"WRDS provides quick, comprehensive access to economic, financial and marketing data, giving researchers a breadth of coverage that is impossible to attain through any other means," said Michael Boldin, director of WRDS and Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. "WRDS has succeeded and grown rapidly because of our deep understanding of this market, our commitment to superior technical and research support and by continued investments in the product, including in the areas of technology and vendor partnerships."

The 100 top-tier business schools, universities, and research institutions who currently subscribe to WRDS include Stanford University, University of Chicago, MIT, Northwestern University, Harvard University, the London Business School, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Looking to the future, WRDS intends to expand its database offerings to new areas that are critical to research in today's economy including corporate governance, mutual funds and corporate social awareness. In addition, through the school's Alfred West Jr. Learning Lab, Wharton is developing new learning modules for business school courses, such as OTIS.

The Wharton School is recognized around the world for its leadership and broad academic strengths across every major discipline and at every level of management education. Founded in 1881 as the nation's first collegiate business school, Wharton has approximately 4,600 undergraduates, MBA, and doctoral students, more than 8,000 participants in its executive education programs annually, and an alumni network of more than 75,000 worldwide.