INDUSTRY
Financial Services
BENEFITS
- Accelerated processing time by 40 percent for core accounting systems to speed processes and improve resource utilization.
- Nutanix improves analytics and reporting performance, creating time for new pre-validation processes that power better data delivery SLAs.
- Saved money migrating core financial services applications to a unified platform that costs substantially less than their high-performance legacy hardware solutions.
SOLUTION
Applications
- SimCorp Dimension (SCD)
- Eagle Investment Systems
- Microsoft SQL Servers
- Oracle database
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) is one of Canada’s largest and most diversified investment managers, committed to finding the best investment opportunities from around the world for its clients. To support its strategy of employing innovative, best-of-breed applications via a service-oriented architecture, AIMCo deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
The Nutanix environment supports a wide array of specialized applications for the asset industry, delivering the performance, stability, and processing power its teams require to gain rapid insight into the state of transactions, and enabling traders to make more informed decisions. Nutanix enables AIMCo to save hours on overnight analytics and reporting processes, giving staff breathing room to discover and remediate potential issues—enhancing accuracy while minimizing risk.
Migrating to Nutanix has made our operations run more smoothly and efficiently and given us the time we need to remediate and perform pre-validation checks each evening, before we run our financial numbers. When we send a report to clients, accuracy is paramount., but equally important is the productivity and morale of our teams. Nutanix has led to improvements in all areas.
Tony Payne, VP Business Technology, AIMCo
CHALLENGE
With more than $115 billion of assets under management, AIMCo is responsible for the investments of 31 pension, endowment and government funds in Alberta, collaborating closely with clients to meet their objectives. Analytics and reporting play a key role in enabling AIMCo to deliver the best possible performance to clients. Each day after markets close, the firm consolidates its data to perform a net asset value (NAV) calculation overnight, to populate reporting data marts for its traders and portfolio managers to use when trading begins the next day.
AIMCo is ten years old as an organization and five years old from a refreshed technology point of view. Over time, the firm’s volumes have grown, complexity has increased, and it has become more difficult to respond to outages, breakages, and business needs. AIMCo also experienced an increasingly limited time window to perform critical NAV calculations. “As the volume of data and computations escalated, we were finding that we did not always have time to complete all our processes on time,” said Tony Payne, VP Business Technology at AIMCo. “This created delays in preparing our traders to execute.”
To keep pace, AIMCo required architectural changes to its primary infrastructure. The firm was seeking to change its point to point interfaces and convert to a service-based architecture. AIMCo also sought to implement a multi-cloud system and position the organization for hybrid cloud. At the same time, the firm sought to boost the processing power, availability, and responsiveness of its systems and its capacity to deal with incidents.
SOLUTION
AIMCo deployed a hyperconverged solution built on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. AIMCo had already experienced significant benefits supporting its Quant team with improved computation, processing, and modeling capabilities. “We adopted Nutanix and realized good gains, with performance improving up to 30 to 60 percent in different areas,” said Payne. “If the Quant group is happy in the company, a lot of people are happy. The ability to do computations, analytics, calculations, and modeling is very much dependent on processing power.”
To further increase efficiency, AIMCo migrated additional applications and processes to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, including its daily reporting data mart distribution, its risk data mart operations, as well as the process of moving files to its critical SimCorp accounting and reporting systems.
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Migrating to Nutanix has saved AIMCo hours in its nightly batch window, allowing staff more time to maximize the quality of its NAV calculation processes. “In our overnight net asset value process, we previously had 11 minutes to remediate any issue,” said Payne. “With Nutanix, we now have 159 minutes, so we have gained more than two hours. The time we are saving has enabled us to set up a pre-validation team that ensures we have accurate data before we run a NAV report. When we find errors now, we actually have the time to remediate them without causing delays down the line. Over the last quarter we have seen our SLOs rise to the highest level we have ever achieved. The whole downstream process is running more smoothly, and with more stability.”
Nutanix has also helped AIMCo to control costs, and, more importantly, free up staff to be more productive and strategic.
Hardware costs have gone down, and we’re experiencing improved performance, but in some ways our strongest outcome has been improved morale. Our pre-NAV validation process minimizes the need for additional manual adjustments and re-work by our operations teams. Less errors, less manual work, better team alignment. Now that’s a positive outcome.
Tony Payne, VP Business Technology at AIMCo
NEXT STEPS
The positive outcomes enabled by Nutanix have inspired AIMCo to continue to work with its partner, Reliant Technologies, to build on its solution. The firm is migrating more of its critical applications and workflows to the platform, to scale performance across the organization. “We are expanding our full production environment onto Nutanix,” said Payne. “We have acquired the hardware and are implementing it into a new data center. We expect that it will go live in the coming months and drive further improvements in performance.”