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FTF NEWS CASE STUDIES PROVIDE ESSENTIAL INSIGHT (Continued from Page 25)CASE STUDIESthat support as opposed to internal staff trying to host various applications for various types of businesses,” Capuzzi says.About eight months ago, the firm was looking to refresh its trading and compliance systems. The firm also wanted to simplify workflows, increase productivity for portfolio and compliance officers, and enable traders to move more quickly to take advantage of market opportunities, according to Philip N. Russo, chief administrative officer, Delaware Investments, in a statement.Delaware Investments, which has more than $185 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2013, is a member of Macquarie Group Ltd., giving it access to the resources of the global provider of asset management, investment, banking, financial and advisory services.“So, first, we chose Charles River as the vendor and we knew we wanted hosting from the beginning, regardless of vendor,” Capuzzi says.The firm also knew that it would have to move off its incumbent systems and servers.“We were on ITG’s [Macgregor] XIP system,” Capuzzi says. “There were some internal [hardware] servers that were decommissioned as a part of this.” The firm moved off the order management system from execution broker and systems provider ITG. Officials at ITG decline comment on the situation.The firm has not gotten rid of all its servers, only those for the trading and compliance systems, Capuzzi says. “We do have other hosted applications. Our accounting system is hosted by BNY Mellon. ... For fixed income, we use the Bloomberg trading system, which is hosted.”In fact, Capuzzi says the firm is very comfortable with the vendors that are hosting applications for it. Initially, the firm had some trepidation about moving to hosted and cloud deployments. “But we have been doing it strategically for the past 10 years, so we’re comfortable with it today,” he says.Overall, the move to the cloud went according to schedule with some minor complications, Capuzzi says. “We had some configuration settings we needed to adjust, but it’s not like we had bugs that needed to be fixed or things like that, so, no, just configurations,” he says. The changes involved end-users viewing their blotters and filtering and splitting orders. “We were testing as early as the beginning of December. We started with some unit testing, and then full system testing, parallel testing.”The implementation hinged upon a good partnership between Charles River and the internal teams at the firm such as IT, data quality, compliance, project management, trade operations and trading, Capuzzi says. The firm’s team “was a very cohesive and cooperative group.”The depth of expertise FISoffered in both global outsourcingand capital markets was exactly what wewere looking for. – Marty DeMonte, CIO, managing director, Jefferies26Jefferies Outsources 100 Employees to FIS(May 12, 2014, by Eugene Grygo)Investment bank Jefferies is outsourcing approximately 100 operations and IT people across its globaloperations to FIS, a banking and payments technology provider, as part of a cost-cutting effort and an embrace of outsourcing as a long-term strategy.Financial services management consulting firm Capco is also a part of the agreement and together FIS and Capco will provide “transformational services” for Jefferies locations across the globe, say bank and vendor officials.The new arrangement is intended to streamline Jefferies’ applications development and IT infrastructure services, officials say. The agreement will help the firm manage systems to cut costs and outsource IT functions so that the bank can focus on “core business goals.”Jefferies picked FIS after analyzing ways to improve operational efficiencies in delivering IT services to the firm’s departments, officials say.The new “strategic partnership” was made to support technology changes while “reducing costs across our global business units,” says Marty DeMonte, CIO and managing director for Jefferies, in a prepared statement. “The depth of expertise FIS offered in both global outsourcing and capital markets was exactly what we were looking for.”FIS, headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla., employs more than 39,000 people worldwide. An FIS company, Capco is a business and technology consultancy for the financial services industry.Editor’s Note: Both FIS and Jefferies officials refused further comment.FALL 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE