Case Study: Investment Manager Renovates Legacy System

Industry: Financial Services

Introduction: This Investment Manager was frustrated with an old legacy system they had in place, it was not aligned with their business processes and making changes to it in its current form was proving expensive and taking too much time. Team members were wasting time finding workarounds to reconcile the way the business was functioning in the present versus how it was in the past. They wanted a system that would be adaptable in the future, delivered for a reasonable price, within a guaranteed time frame and that wasn't going to impact other projects nor day-to-day operations.

Challenges:

• The business had progressed and the processes had been improved over time, but the old legacy system functionality was not reflecting that. This made the improvements less impactful and more costly to try and retrofit into the old way of doing things that the legacy system had been built around

• As the business was continuing to evolve any small changes that were needed to improve productivity and efficiency were costly, the business needed the system to be more responsive to new requirements going forward

• Many of the key business systems that were required for the business to function relied completely on a few people, which significantly increased the key-man dependency

• Naturally the amount of data had increased over time, but this had a negative impact on the performance of the old legacy system

• Technology that the legacy system was based upon was outdated which made support, maintenance and enhancement expensive and sometimes near impossible

Objectives:

• The project needed to be delivered in a guaranteed time frame in order to meet certain high profile business milestones

• The client had a perfectly capable development team in place, however with other projects and the responsibilities involved with day-to-day operations, they needed a short-term increase to their development capacity in order to get this project delivered, without increasing the head count in the long term

• New business functionality required and likely future requirements had to be quicker and cheaper to implement going forward

• Improve the stability and performance of the system

• Leverage the new functionality and capabilities of updated technologies

• Reduce key-man dependency through use of additional resources and improved documentation

Solution:

The Investment Manager partnered with Synetec in order to deliver a system that retained all the necessary features of the old legacy system while implementing enhancements that team members needed to improve productivity. Not using internal developers allowed the potential risks of systems development to be mitigated and ensured that their business as usual activities were not impacted. The agile renovated system is now far more adaptable to future requirements, which would prevent hesitation in potential process change and reduce expenses going forward.

Benefits:

Forecasts indicate that the maintenance of the system in the future should be reduced by an estimated 20%. The internal developers gained through knowledge transfer from the Synetec development team and are in a better position to incorporate best practises into other projects. System performance has improved by approximately 150% in some areas where users could search and manipulate large data sets, this has been attributed to the redesign of the underlying architecture and the improved performance of the current technology frameworks.

 “Through moving to recent Microsoft technologies we have not only improved performance of the system, but have access to new capabilities that will make delivery of future requirements far more cost effective. Mixing internal and near-sourced developers also proved extremely beneficial for business risk as well as knowledge transfer and I am sure those benefits will be reaped for a long time to come.”

 – Gregory, Technical Director

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Criteria for Successful Software Vendor Selection

The success of selecting a vendor really comes down to one thing: can they deliver? As you seek a vendor keep that in the forefront of your mind at all times.  Any cost savings or operational efficiencies you generate can be quickly negated if your organisation can't get what it really needs on time. Rarely as straightforward as it sounds. The points below are what I categorise as key in terms of what you need to consider when selecting a software vendor?

Good Fit

The software needs to not only meet your key business requirements, but to be easily configurable to work within your environment. It has to be a good fit and that needs to be recognised from the beginning. Depending on the scenario, integration can take anywhere up to 50% of total project time (have often seen instances of longer than this). With that in mind, numerous real-life examples of the software working in a similar environment is extremely helpful and reassuring.

 

Quality and Expertise

That is where the expertise comes in. If the vendor has an experienced team they would have performed similar implementations numerous times in similar environments and they will be in a position to avoid pitfalls and make the process run as smoothly as possible. The quality of the team does not only relate to their technical ability. If the vendor is treating their team well, they will tend to retain them for longer which improves their experience and specifically from your perspective ensures that you are dealing with the same up-to-speed team members. How much wasted time and frustration results from having to explain your requirements or issues to different individuals who are being exposed to them or you for the first time.

Location, Language and Culture

As you seek the vendor for your organization, it’s vital to keep in mind the location, language and culture of their workforce - and more to the point, how it aligns with your organization. Communication issues encompass both language and culture and when dealing with communication of requirements, life is made a great deal easier when requirements that aren't thrashed out to the most finite detail, are grasped implicitly. Cultural sensitivities aside, the best vendor for your needs will have a team that can easily communicate and work with your organization and that usually entails an onshore workforce.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke software solutions.

Top 3 Tips to Effective SQL Server Monitoring

Introduction

In a discussion with an infrastructure administrator at one of our clients I was asked how they could become more pro-active about monitoring their SQL Server environment. I think this is a good question because although almost all companies are monitoring whether their SQL Server environment is operational, not all of them are monitoring the key elements that indicate whether the environment might not be operational shortly or to dramatize, indicate imminent disaster.

Effective SQL Server monitoring has to include the ability to forecast any resource issues, monitor the individual environments and being informed in an appropriate response time of any potential issues. Below are some of the key elements of that conversation in an article.

 

Get the right tools

Having a monitoring tool is the first important point to make, I don't really mind whether its bought off-the-shelf or custom-built, but it needs to be configurable, robust and allow the easy monitoring of the key elements without the need for loads of work every time a SQL Server database is a added to the environment. Always use a separate environment for the monitoring tool. Both the server and database need to be separate, it seems obvious, but if your server has failed and your monitoring service is on that server, it doesn't help much. Less importantly, but something to be kept in mind is to choose your monitoring intervals so that they are frequent enough to give you an appropriate response time, but not so frequent as to affect your servers performance. Routinely test your monitoring tool and also the impact the monitoring is having on your server's performance, especially after the addition of a new server or database to your environment. On that note any new servers in your environment should be automatically added to the monitoring tool.

Devil is in the documentation

Documentation is an ugly word to most, but a necessary evil. In order to effectively monitor your SQL Server environment you need to know database and server configurations, any changes to these, how they deviate from the normal default values and the company standards. In summary we need to monitor server properties, database properties, instance configuration, database configuration and security. This data should be collected across all servers and then stored in a central repository and the collection should be automated.

Watch this space

So we have our monitoring tool, but what do we need to be sure we are watching? Backups is the first and most obvious port of call. Are the various database backups running, that includes the full backups, any differential backups and the log backups. Monitoring of the storage location for availability is also recommended. Next would be the SQL Agent jobs and monitoring whether any failed, did any take abnormally long and any jobs that failed to run. A potentially crucial difference exists between jobs that don't run and jobs that run, but fail. Speaking of space, monitoring of database file sizes is essential. You should monitor not only certain set milestones (i.e. 80% ), but also the rate of growth over time, which is vital in planning for extra disk-space.

Next, we would list memory, CPU and I/O, and again these would need to be tracked over time. These metrics, looked at as a collection of information, especially over time can help diagnose any problem or potential problem areas. Then lastly, we would definitely want to monitor any specific issues such as deadlocks, extended blocked processes, long running queries, index issues, high severity errors and timeouts.

 

Conclusion

The main objective is to enable you to identify and respond to problems as quickly as possible, ideally before they even occur. This strategy will enable you to find the problem areas and improve the performance of the servers and the applications that use them over time. I have seen many instances, if you will excuse the pun, of organisations with properly configured monitoring tools in place identify and fix SQL Server issues before users are even aware of them.

George Toursoulopoulos is a technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of software services and solutions.

Case Study: Hedge Fund implements new information management system

Case Study

Hedge Fund implements new information management system

Industry: Financial Services

Objective: Provide a system which consolidates all internal sources of data, specifically research and emails

IT Objectives:

• Deliver automated collation and indexing of all trade, research and email related information across systems and formats

• Implement a user-friendly and reliable system that enables authorised company employees to locate enriched information

• Reduce cost and time for access to company information

• Reduce load and increase performance of Exchange server

Business Objectives:

• Enable employees to locate and share related information from various sources

• Increase insight into access and use of internal information

• Remove the need for employees to use their mailboxes as information stores

Introduction:

This Hedge Fund was looking to improve accessibility to information from various systems and across formats to employees, while reducing the usage of Exchange mailboxes for storing of data. All documents were being stored on a network drive, with access and changes not being audited. Furthermore, related information on different mediums (particularly email), was effectively inaccessible by other employees and in practice lost once the employee left the organisation.

Challenge:

Most organisations, and particularly Financial Service Institutions, have user mailbox sizes in gigabytes. These emails have important information that could be useful to other team members and are inaccessible. There is an expense related to this, in time and productivity, while it also forces the business to spend large sums of money keeping their Exchange server responsive. When the employee moves on, that information effectively is lost, while it may reside on some offsite backup, it is effectively hidden and not easily referenced.

Key processes related information is stored on a variety of mediums and formats, so for example research can exist in the shape of a PDF on the network drive, a excel spreadsheet with calculations and emails containing relevant information. The challenge is to make that data accessible in a central location, to enable team members to effectively find and utilise that information regardless of where it originated from or the location it resided.

Solution:

As the manner of communication and sharing of data continues to evolve, so must the methods and systems that are used in order to manage that valuable information. This forward-thinking hedge fund realise that in order to improve productivity and utilise their valuable information to maintain their  competitive edge they needed to implement an enriched information management system.

Benefits:

Roll-out of the system has been completed ahead of schedule and on budget, users have taken to it with surprising ease, information has been enriched to provide additional value and email server storage has been reduced by just under a terabyte of data, which has improved the performance of outlook.

Client Quote:

“The amount of usable information seems to be pouring out of nooks and crannies with the sharing of this information taken to a new level, the major advantage from our perspective is the continuity of the data and the traceability of who is doing what with our valuable and sensitive data."

 – Miles, CTO

3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

Introduction

Cloud computing has transformed the IT landscape, public cloud offerings can help businesses reduce costs and increase business agility. These cloud services offer enormous economic benefits but they also pose significant potential risks for enterprises that must protect corporate data while complying with industry and government regulations. The purpose of this article to help enterprises make pragmatic decisions about specific issues that should be identified before selecting a hosting provider.

Data Centre

To me this is the biggest issue, the industry leaders will have their own state-of-the-art data centres and they will be geographically spread out to help reduce risk. That is not to say that there aren't some excellent vendors out there that use other data centres, yet still provide a world class support service, but as a rule of thumb I prefer vendors to have their own data centres and a few of them. I would also visit the data centres before making a decision and see how secure are they, what is your general feel about the place.

Outages

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. All vendors like to claim 99.9 % of uptime, but 80% of stats are made up. Joking. The truth though is often different because everyone naturally has selection criteria of what counts as an outage, completely understandable, so speak to existing clients and see what they say about how many times the vendor hosted systems were down over the previous year and for how long.

Platform

Most vendors that we have dealt with run on VMware, but there are some that use other systems, whether mainstream or proprietary, it is important to know which virtualisation software they use. Again, call me boring, but I prefer VMware, not only is it tried and tested, but should you ever want to leave, it's a relatively simple process. Should you choose a vendor with different virtualisation software to the vendor you are moving to it will be no simple matter.

George Toursoulopoulos is a financial technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke financial services software solutions. 

Case Study: Asset Manager rolls out new compliance investigation system

Industry Financial Services Objective Provide a platform to reduce costs associated with managing external and internal compliance investigations IT Objectives Introduce a systematic methodology for providing a reliable and cost-effective compliance information repository Deliver automated collation and indexing of all compliance related information across systems and formats Reduce cost and time for access to company and system wide compliance related information Business Objectives Offer early detection, minimising risk and enhancing information quality Embrace diversity of compliance related information in a cohesive system, supporting future changes Accelerate investigation response times across the enterprise, increasing efficiency and adding business value

Introduction: This Asset Manager was looking to reduce costs and timeframes associated with managing compliance investigations. Their Compliance Officers were spending valuable time gathering and sifting through large data sets to find what they required in order to deal with FCA, Exchange and internally initiated investigations. Challenge: Financial Service Institutions worldwide regularly receive and have to respond to a variety of compliance investigations as they strive to enhance information quality and increase agility while simultaneously reducing costs and mitigating risk. Compliance officers have to spend an increasing amount of time gathering and sifting through large data sets to find what they require, often having to rely on already busy IT resources in order to locate the relevant information, instead of being able to focus on keeping the organisation compliant. With regulatory pressure to demonstrate due care, forward-looking companies such as this want to provide another way to illustrate their commitment and diligence to meeting regulatory obligations. Solution: As companies have dramatically increasing amounts of information to manage across growingly  diverse formats a system has to be 'aware' of other applications and frameworks within the organisation, only then can the relevant information be indexed, enriched and made available in an organic and company-wide manner. This progressive asset manager realised that in order to both reduce costs and improve responsiveness, both in quality and time, they needed to adopt a compliance investigation system. Benefits: Roll-out of the system is complete and response time to compliance queries has been reduced by 30% on average, costs have been reduced by 40% on average. These figures are based upon initial investigations and are likely to improve over time. Client Quote: “Although introducing a new system can come with technological challenges, the primary challenge is usually cultural. However our Compliance Officers have embraced the system that has essentially empowered them. They now have more time to provide insight into the underlying information and are already more comfortable in knowing that all of the information is in front of them. We also all appreciate how easy the system is to use, which fast-tracked the training process.”  – Simon, Group Compliance Officer For more information regarding our software products please visit Synetec Compliance Investigation System George Toursoulopoulos is a financial technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke financial services software solutions.

3 Tips for Speeding up Systems Delivery

3 Tips for Speeding up Systems Delivery

The development of complex software involves significant challenges. To prosper companies must balance engineering and technical excellence with increasingly challenging business objectives. What does that mean in real terms?

1.       Managing costs

2.       Managing development time

3.       Meeting requirements

4.       Controlling quality

5.       Managing change

6.       Complying with any applicable regulations

Traditional systems development must adapt to effectively meet these goals because it focuses too strongly on its various functions in isolation, as opposed to a holistic view of the system. The experience of riding a bicycle cannot be understood by looking at the how the gear system works or the function of the brakes as separate parts.

Requirements Management

Gathering of requirements should take place from the 'horse's mouth' whenever possible, that often involves busy high-profile users, but if you want them to be happy first-time around, then get a little of their time and use it well. Analysts need to understand what the users want and share that in its entirety with the development team. Going to the functional specification level immediately often results in information being lost and the developers don't start with the best chance of making the right decisions along the way (this happens to be one of the biggest challenges when outsourcing offshore). Once the requirements have been gathered these need to be effectively shared, so everyone between the end-user and the quality assurance team have access to them. Simple concept with powerful results! Engineers can refer to them for the little decisions that need to be made throughout the life-cycle and QA can go 'beyond' testing from a specification perspective.

Delivery Management

Agile methodology has gone a long way to improve the likelihood of synchronising deliverables with expectation, however we have found that the using a hybrid of Agile and Waterfall concepts produce the best results. Every environment is difference, so find the right recipe for that 'perfect bake' as Mary Berry would say! With cloud-based systems rollout has become simpler, but only if it's considered from the very beginning. Architectural decisions should be influenced by constraints and nuances of the infrastructure, as opposed to being seen as a last stop.

Communications Management

Regular and open communication builds trust, performance and is essential in empowering team members to meet and exceed expectations. Accountability is essential! In larger organisations this is more challenging, but the more team members don't shy away from sometimes difficult conversations, and the more the key information is available to all project team members, the better the performance will get. Technical jargon is often used to conceal misunderstanding or worse, poor performance, so it is well worth the time to decrypt these so that they can be truly shared.

George Toursoulopoulos is a financial technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke financial services software solutions.