Global
Case Study
Ness Facilitates a Leading Institutional Asset Manager’s Digital Transformation
Executive Summary
A leading institutional asset manager faced a generational technology refresh due to aging systems that caused performance and reliability problems. The client struggled to introduce new functionality because of the undocumented complexity of its systems; releases were frequently rolled back due to a lack of production-like environments that would allow for proper load testing. The asset manager engaged Ness to develop an architecture that would improve throughput, increase reliability, and allow for frequent iterative releases with predictable success.
About The Client
The client is a global institutional asset manager with offices on five continents and upwards of $500 million under management. The firm offers investors a broad range of core, sector-specific, and customized portfolios across every sector of the market.
The Challenge
Decades of organic systems growth caused an accumulation of technical debt. The client’s systems were tightly coupled and had single points of failure. Localized changes no longer yielded a meaningful return, necessitating the firm’s investment in a major Digital Transformation initiative. As is the case when refactoring business critical systems: the changes needed to happen without resulting in a business interruption.
Why The Client Chose Ness
The client engaged Ness because of the firm’s deep domain knowledge, advanced technical skill, and iterative methodology. Additionally, the firm’s AWS Migration, DevOps, and Financial Services Competencies were credentials for its track record of delivering on Digital Transformation projects in the same industry as the client.
The Solution
Ness worked with the client’s technology leadership across multiple siloed applications to document the information flows as well as to identify the client’s major pain points. Ness reoriented the design thinking away from a “shared state” and towards a shared-flow architecture. Ness then worked with stakeholders to pick a starting point: an application that would have the biggest impact on the business in the shortest delivery time. From there, Ness developed a roadmap for the client’s entire Digital Transformation.
In order to ensure efficient infrastructure utilization and the availability of environments-as-a-service (EaaS), Ness put forward a plan to migrate the development and some production systems to AWS.
Lastly, to de-risk the chosen trajectory, Ness designed and implemented a set of proof-of-value implementations demonstrating the scalability and reliability of the suggested architecture.
Results and Benefits
Ness enabled the client to embark on a full Digital Transformation with an organization-wide consensus on the initiative’s trajectory. The client has a roadmap with frequent iterative deliverables, architecture choices have been validated with proofs of concept, and application boundaries have been defined. In moving away from data centers, the firm will gain infrastructure elasticity, multi-region reliability, and a micros-services architecture based on high-performance analytics for event streams coming from the markets.
Ness’s AWS Migration Competency enabled it to work with the AWS account team to secure substantial funding for the project, including offsetting client fees by approximately 45%.
