As you might be aware, on February 12, 2010, the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) and the Option Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) will change the current US and Canada options symbology.
The details of the OSI can be found here:
http://www.theocc.com/initiatives/symbology/implementation_plan.jsp.

Briefly, option symbol is being expanded to 21 characters, which are including now underlying ticker, option expiration date, option type (call/put) and strike.

This will lead to a certain changes in IVolatility data services (daily updates, intraday Volatility Server, SDK) as well as in our web-site tools.

In the data services with the CSV-file delivery, the only change is an extension of an option ticker to 21 characters. Therefore, only the clients who are receiving option ticker in a CSV file are affected. Thus if you are receiving IVIndex, historical volatility or volatility surface, no changes are needed.

For clients who receive data in database format, more modifications will be applied. We will provide the special scripts that will automatically update the database and apply necessary changes. The changes include enlarging the option symbol field, and minor modifications of the procedures.

We offer sample data for a testing purpose. It can help you to make sure that your internal process is ready to accept new changes. To order a test file, please contact us.

We have sent a personal e-mail to each of our data-service client informing about upcoming changes in the data delivery files or database. If you are our data service client but you have not received any e-mail from us so far, or should you have more questions, please contact us urgently at support@ivolatility.com.

Web site tools changes are different for each service. In most cases, the long new option ticker will be hidden and shown by a mouse over. Web site changes will be applied later and we will additionally inform about it.