New Release of SS&C PORTIA Helps Asset Managers with Global Accounting Operations

Our global and diverse client base increasingly needs to localize accounting operations to meet country-specific requirements and regulations including GAAP and IFRS accounting standards.  This week we were happy to announce that the latest release of PORTIA has improved the flexibility of its calculation and posting rules, enabling asset managers to support an unlimited number of accounting bases to meet these unique operational requirements.

PORTIA provides greater flexibility and configurability to help customers account for costs, track fees, define posting rules and address other unique accounting requirements.  Enhanced reporting tools provide transparency into regional accounting practices and address regulatory requirements.

“SS&C PORTIA provides substantial new functionality to assist asset managers implement multiple accounting bases and support accounting requirements that vary by country or region,” said Christy Bremner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, SS&C. “Customers are upgrading to take advantage of the functional benefits to improve the efficiency and quality of their accounting operations.”

Mobile Apps Are Everywhere. But Will They Ever Dominate the Middle and Back Office Space?

It seems like everywhere you look, there it is—mobile technology.  In the news, on the radio, in your lap, in the hand of the pedestrian weaving in front of you on the sidewalk.  Everywhere.  Kind of.  A recent study by Booz & Company, The Wealth Advisor’s New App How Tablets Can Transform the Retail Wealth Management Business, cited that iPad sales outpace sales of other i-devices by three times.  The prevalence of mobile technology and this explosive growth of the tablet shine a spotlight on what for me is a pretty glaring question—why isn’t mobile technology taking over middle and back offices?

To answer that, let’s start with the Booz & Company study, research that speaks to the matter of mobile technology and the front office.  Market turbulence and generally choppy economic conditions have helped create a competitive business environment, one where standing out in a crowded landscape is one of the biggest challenges that businesses are facing.  Because of this, customer service is crucial, and this is one place where those in the front office can take advantage of mobile technology—to get closer to customers and to make it easier for them to do business.  In the front-office space, growth in the use of tablets by customers has virtually forced businesses to figure out what resultant opportunity exists and to seize it.  The tablet allows advisors to provide new and enhanced features and services to clients, either by using applications themselves or by making them available for customers to use.  In both cases, the apps allow access to and facilitate things such as:

• Contact management and email
• Account information and maintenance
• News, market data, and research
• Trading
• Activity tracking
• Portfolio management

 In the middle and back offices, it’s a bit different.  Privacy, regulation, and compliance place a different set of demands on the players in these spaces.  Put most simply, mobile apps are unproven and haven’t earned the market’s trust.  Beyond that, a lot of the industry regulations are new; people haven’t figured out regulatory impacts on existing operations.  The thought of branching into this new mobile-technology territory seems especially daunting in the context of these regulatory changes and their uncertain operational impacts. 

An FTF Q&A from September (registration required) takes a look at mobile technology in the middle- and back-office.  The interviewee (a CEO of a research firm) notes that the emergence of mobile devices is coming from the bottom up—employees are using this technology on their own and often outside of their employers’ control.  A question about the integration of mobile strategies with operations in 2013 was asked and the respondent was very clear that he sees no move at all by employers in this area, although he does see increased use of the technology by employees.  He notes that financial services firms are generally conservative and reactive by nature and cites “the current climate of fear and concern” as a barrier to operational integration.  Beyond that, any hint of opportunity that he sees is in the outsourcing space and the provision of remote access, and he is clear that he doesn’t see it revolutionizing the industry.  This is a single perspective, where some views are aligned with conventional wisdom and others are a little more black and white than reality indicates.

The bottom line as I see it is this: security, compliance, and regulations protect core data, processes and the operations that support them.  Mobile technology presents too many unanswered questions, thus too much risk—something that financial services firms are unable to take on in the current business climate.  However, over time, as firms understand the impacts of both emerging regulations and technologies, they’ll undoubtedly take a second look.  Given that they’ll likely face organizational pressure from employees and customers as the technology becomes even more pervasive, firms need to stay attuned to any developments and the associated challenges, as well as how they fit with business strategies.  If and when the benefits are revealed, firms must be ready to move quickly and make the most of new opportunities. 

That’s how it is for us here at PORTIA—we work hard to understand how new technology can help us as a business and also how it can help us deliver products that help customers achieve strategic goals and meet the growing demands of their client bases.  There are two primary places to look for opportunity—in both internal and external communications and in operations, both yours and your customers’.  By assessing these opportunities relative to organizational goals and strategies, a standard cost-benefit analysis will help you understand the risks and make decisions when the time is right.

 – Nicole Comeau, Product Manager

Agile Development – Rapid Iterations and Continuous Customer Input Yield Better Results

The concept of agile development was born out of a belief that a methodology based on learning, innovation, and change would yield better results. Agile principles emphasize building working software quickly with rapid iterations, while gathering continuous customer input along the way.  

By far the most popular agile method is Scrum. With the goal of rapidly developing quality software, Scrum supports a creative approach to the development of complex and innovative systems and it scales to a large numbers of developers.  It is used on some of the world’s largest projects at companies such as British Telecom, Yahoo, Google and Siemens.  In a properly implemented Scrum process, the goal is for productivity per developer to stay constant regardless of the amount of headcount added.  This allows the methodology to scale and remain flexible.

Scrum is designed to add energy, focus, clarity, and transparency to project planning and implementation.   The move to a Scrum methodology in projects has consistently shown an increase speed of development,  better alignment in individual and corporate objectives, improved culture driven by performance, increased interactions with customers and stakeholders and constant customer advocacy through the role of the Product Owner.

The PORTIA development team implemented an agile software development methodology using Scrum in early 2011, reaping the benefits as we continue to develop PORTIA v11.  Such benefits include adaptable deliverables and flexible schedules, enabling the PORTIA team to deliver a significant new release to market.   The frequent reviews and extensive inter and intra collaboration on v11 led to  more user-friendly workflows and role-specific functionality.   

The Scrum methodology provides an increased focus on the “customer voice” through the Product Owner role.  The Product Owner acts as the “advocate” for the customer perspective.  Over the past few months, PORTIA’s Product Owners have been in touch with over 50% of PORTIA clients in order to validate and review requirements; ensuring new development is addressing their concerns and exceeding their requirements.  The Scrum methodology  allows the PORTIA team to be flexible throughout the enhancement cycle and provides control mechanisms for planning a product release and managing variables as the project progresses.

Agile development is focused on delivering maximum business value in the shortest possible time. It is well-known that using traditional development methodologies, over half the requirements on a typical software project change during development and about half the features in delivered software are never used by customers.  Adaptive planning and self-organizing teams, as are utilized in Agile development methodologies, embrace changing requirements and avoid building features with low return on investment. The result is faster delivery, better quality, a more creative and successful working environment and, most importantly, higher client satisfaction.

– Amy Layous, Product Manager

A History Of Usability

As our clients know from recent conversations about our product roadmap, our Product teams are constantly thinking about usability and user experience.  I recently came across an interesting article titled “The History Of Usability: From Simplicity To Complexity,” from Smashing Magazine, which is an online publication for professional Web designers and developers, with an emphasis on design. The article provides an interesting history of design and makes the argument that design has become more complex over time – but what I found most compelling is the structure it suggests for conducting design moving forward. 

The article begins with ancient history and moves to discussing the different schools of thought around design.  The article makes a clear distinction between two current methods for conducting usability work – analytical vs. empirical evaluation methods.  Analytical evaluation methods are based on examining the system and potential interactions with it, whereas the empirical evaluation technique is based on actual usage data.  The article then makes a distinction between usability and user experience, the latter representing an expansion of the usability discipline beyond design to include psychology and cognition.

Consistent with the article’s recommendations, PORTIA has always designed products and solutions using a careful balance of both analytical and empirical evaluation methodologies.  Not only do we study our systems carefully throughout our software development lifecycle process to make sure they are meeting benchmarks and standards, but we also engage in significant user testing with a variety of stakeholders to ensure that the system is exceeding expectations and meeting the real-life needs and workflows of our clients. For example, many of our clients have been deeply involved in the design of PORTIA v11, our latest software release, through development communities and user testing groups.

As we’ve discussed before, usability is a key component of our product evolution and continues to play a big role in our latest release of PORTIA v11.  In PORTIA v8, we introduced our corporate actions module with a new workflow concept, which we then used as a template for all new functionality released (ex: swaps manager, fund accounting, etc). In subsequent versions of PORTIA we introduced the PORTIA Workspace, which made the entire PORTIA system more intuitive and customizable for users.  Now PORTIA v11 is evolving the product a step further by providing role-based workflows and simpler outputs using new technology and graphical formats to make PORTIA even easier to use.

The final point that struck me from the Smashing Magazine article is that responsibility for usability has shifted from a single person in an organization who specialized in the discipline to teams of product design and development managers who are responsible for engraining usability into all aspects of a software development lifecycle.  At PORTIA, all of our product development staff is involved in the usability and user experience decision-making process because everyone is tasked with understanding client workflows and how they impact our products.  We believe this helps us strike the right balance between analytical vs. empirical research, and helps bring many different perspectives to bear and arrive at the best conclusions possible.

 If you are an existing PORTIA client and want to get more involved in usability testing or want to provide us with specific feedback on PORTIA’s user experience, please email me directly at JGouzoules@sscinc.com.  What challenges do you see with usability and user experience in the financial technology industry?  Do you think there is a best way to conduct usability research, and do you see this changing over time?

 –          John Gouzoules, Product Development Manager

The Confluence of Outsourcing and Cloud

In the past few months, our commercial teams have heard a lot of talk about two financial technology topics – outsourcing and cloud computing.  We also see lots of activity in the press about these topics, but the coverage varies wildly in terms of how these topics are defined and where people believe these industries are heading.

In a recent Waters Buy-Side Technology article titled “Outsourcing and Cloud Are NOT the Same Thing”, Anthony Malakian clearly articulates the difference between outsourcing and cloud computing.  To sum, he argues that cloud computing is a tool and outsourcing is a strategy, which often involves cloud computing.  The article then explains why the semantics over definitions matter – we highly recommend that you read the entire Waters piece.

We agree with Waters that outsourcing and cloud computing are different, but how exactly?  When you add the term “software-as-a-service” to the conversation, definitions get even blurrier.  We think it’s easiest to think about cloud computing in two distinct ways:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) – this involves the end user accessing a remote product or e-commerce service over the internet or through an internet-enabled portal.  The most common example of SaaS is web-based email services, such as Gmail, but it can apply to all types of software.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – this service is for firms who want to maintain control of their software environment, but don’t want to maintain any equipment.  IaaS providers provide the hardware needed for a firm’s operation, and the firm can put whatever software they want on the hardware.  This is often referred to as “hosting” or “facilities management”.

There are two types of cloud models firms can use to obtain the services above, which can be blended depending on a firm’s specific needs:

• Public cloud model – Also known as a shared cloud, services are provided with no control over the underlying technology infrastructure.  This is attractive because it reduces complexity – for example, this model requires no testing and deployment.  It also tends to be cheaper.  However, many financial services firms avoid this model because of security, data and regulatory concerns.
• Private cloud model – Also called an internal or enterprise cloud, this model involves deploying software in a hosted data center or within a company’s intranet.  To oversimplify, firms using private clouds do not share resources or information with other organizations.

We believe one of the reasons this topic causes confusion is because there are many cloud models that involves both software and hardware in various configurations, and the definitions above are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The term outsourcing adds an additional layer of complexity to the discussion.  As explained by Waters, outsourcing by definition means engaging with a third party (such as PORTIA), to provide a service.  So if you rely on a vendor to manage your hardware in either a public or private cloud, you are outsourcing.

In the financial technology industry, outsourcing is often used as a catch-all term by vendors to refer to “business process outsourcing” (BPO), which involves an investment firm outsourcing all or parts of their operations to a vendor.  This almost always requires that the vendor use software and hardware to manage the process and this is where cloud computing comes in – SaaS, Iaas, or both.  But in the case of BPO, the investment firm is paying for the management of the process and any technology management benefits are secondary to that goal.

In May, we attended the TSAM North American conference by Osney Media and outsourcing and cloud computing were discussed at length.  Here are a few of our takeaways from the conference:

• Investment firms are both interested in these offerings and confused by the variety of offerings provided by technology vendors
• The financial services industry has been a laggard in cloud computing and outsourcing, due to many factors related to regulatory requirements, data control issues and economic conditions over the past few years
• There is a consensus that outsourcing and cloud computing provides more value than just cost savings, but that cost savings is often the driver for examining these solutions
• Both of these offerings will grow more rapidly than the overall financial technology market
• Investment firms want to work with technology vendors who will truly partner with them, not just provide a black-box service or standard solution that doesn’t meet their operational needs

At PORTIA, we provide completely customized outsourcing services for the middle-to-back office – ranging from basic hosting (IaaS) in dedicated or shared environments to full business process outsourcing.  We work with clients to understand their complex, operational needs and develop solutions that specifically address their challenges.  Contact us to learn more about how we outsource middle-to-back office functions, and where we see outsourcing and cloud computing offerings evolving to meet the needs of investment firms.

–          Munther Haddad, Vice President, Global Implementation and Outsourcing Services

Conquering the Next Frontier in Investment Data Analytics

In the asset management technology world we are always asking, “What’s the next big thing that will change the technology landscape?” 

 In the early 2000s, everyone wanted a STP front-to-back office operation.  By the end of the decade, the buzzwords were about outsourcing middle-and-back office operations (a mix of man and machine).  So now the question everyone seems to be asking is, “what more can technology deliver to us?”

 A few days ago I was reading a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal on “big data.” It spoke about how a handful of cutting-edge companies were helping firms comb through terabytes and pentabytes of data by applying intelligent algorithms to aggregate and identify critical insights. As I read through the article I saw how, if harnessed properly, application of intelligent algorithms could be the next big technology trend for asset management firms.

 When looking at large asset managers in the Middle East, most of the back-office operations systems have been in place for a good decade (and often much longer as you look globally).  Within these operations, every year several thousand transactions are entered and stored in back-office databases.  This information is then combined with a few thousand disjointed demographic information points from wealth management / CRM systems. And then, on top of that add historical prices, exchange rates, research notes, etc. aggregated from a multitude of sources.  You quickly end up with a system with vast quantities of data – but what good is that if you can’t harness it into useful information. I continued reading the WSJ article and did some additional research, to learn about these algorithms and how they apply to our industry.

There are several types of algorithms which are used by data analytics firms that lend themselves to asset management. First, anomaly detection algorithms are, in simple terms, a string which could be used by companies to identify whether an investment transaction is in or out of pattern, ex: does it match typical portfolio manager/trader behaviour, or not? Classification algorithms may be used to answer the question of whether this out-of-pattern activity is fraudulent or not. 

 Looking at it simply, you can see applicability to the asset management industry. From avoiding an “Adobili scandal” (UBS rogue trader) to analyzing your past data to helping understand why loss-making deals were done, these algorithms help firms learn from mistakes to avoid them in the future. Now imagine if you could insert such an algorithm into your pre-/post-trade analyses and have your middle-office comb through fewer transactions, thereby reducing your workload in the middle-office compliance function!

Then there are clustering algorithms which could be used by asset management firms to better understand client behaviour by utilizing the seemingly disjointed demographic information stored in databases. For example, what other people is this fund investor of yours most like? You could mix a clustering algorithm with a recommendation algorithm (k+nearest neighbor algo) and answer critical questions such as “what fund or ETF would this customer be most likely to invest in?”

One of the fundamental building blocks to utilizing algorithms to analyze your data in order to make better business decisions is a strong back-office with a single book of records. A single book of records provided by a product like PORTIA – with the flexibility to import and export all required data – ensures that these algorithmic systems can be easily put into place when the time is right, to give you more robust decision-making and support tools to deliver more value to your end users.

Given the power of the systems that utilize these algorithms, it is easy to see why this would be the next big leap in data and technology for asset managers. The systems are already there, being cleverly used by firms in the retail FMCG industry, credit card fraud management industry, automotive industry, etc. It is only a matter of intelligently adapting these technologies to suit our industry.

 I truly believe this could be the next frontier in the buy-side…to paraphrase from Star Trek “to explore strange new worlds (unstructured Data), to seek out new (alpha) and new (client needs), to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

– Anup Namboodiri, Sales Executive, EMEA

Can You See The Forest For The Trees?

One of the major challenges faced in investment operations is the management of complex, disparate data.  Consolidating and organizing data in such a way  to allow good business decisions to be made has become daunting as the volume and complexity of data have increased.  At this time of year, as many people are decorating their holiday trees, it is striking how little progress the industry has made in terms of getting better sight of the forest for the trees.

Investment operations really does have a lot of ‘trees’ – typically running multiple complex systems that  span from multiple trading platforms, CRM systems and accounting systems to data feeds, reporting and other ERP systems.  Gaining access to the data in the workflow through this complex environment, and using this data in a consolidated, meaningful way can pose many challenges.  People in the enterprise can quickly find themselves surrounded by spreadsheets sourced from different systems.  Data unification and cleansing occurs as a manual process.  New spreadsheets need to be created in order to display different views of data.  This quickly turns into a time-consuming process which is an accuracy and manageability nightmare.

This problem directly affects the ability of the enterprise to make well-informed business decisions in a timely fashion.  At the heart of the issues resides data storage.  Data needs to be consolidated and organized into a structure that enables fast retrieval in formats that can be easily manipulated to answer business questions.  This need for easy manipulation implies that views of data must be dynamic so that the information can be shaped to form a story and answer deeper questions at varying granular views.  For example, in one view, you may quickly see how an asset class performed last quarter and then drill into how each sector, industry, sub-industry performed all the way down to the security level.  Then layer on other dimensions, to cross reference against market conditions for specific time periods and various other factors, enabling the enterprise to better predict what can be expected in similar or changing conditions for the future.

This structure provides deep analysis of key data in a fast-paced environment that enables management to leverage information to drive business decisions.  Overall, this leads to a higher level of business intelligence so that the enterprise can make better decisions faster.

PORTIA’s underlying data structures and open architecture can already be used to enable this real-time analysis of critical data.  However, we do not rest on our success to date – we are consistently on the hunt for new technologies that bring increased value to our clients.   In the critical area of business intelligence, we see some attractive new technologies that we will begin to incorporate in future PORTIA releases to enhance our offering. 

In our plans for 2012, we will begin incorporating  “cube” reporting into the PORTIA platform.  Advances in technologies, such as UDM (Unified Dimensional Model) and MDX (Multi-dimensional Expressions), provide a great platform for building infrastructure that takes complex underlying data and relationships between data and translates it into data cubes that enhance business intelligence capabilities for PORTIA users.

The cube is a very powerful tool to increase business intelligence as it allows us to store different kinds of data like transactions, holdings, performance measurement, security master, and account information in a central repository.  Data can be loaded at quick intervals, as well as cleansed and unified in the same step.  Data can also be brought in from outside sources and combined with accounting data.  Once in the cube, the end-user will be able to perform such tasks as data drilldown, data pivoting and data mining.  For example, you could look at a list of accounts with trailing 12 month ROR figures;  then pivot the data to see a list of ROR ranges, total number of accounts and which fall into each range.  The data begins to be more meaningful and also malleable so questions can be answered on demand.

In addition to gathering and mining the data, good user interface technologies are essential to presenting the data so that there is a high level of interactivity and intuitive navigation across the cube.   We have done some good early development on new tools that will help PORTIA accomplish an excellent level of data visualization, data exploration, and data presentation.  Much more to come on that topic in future blogs. 

This is an exciting time for PORTIA as we think about the opportunities that lie ahead, given our ability to harness the power of the underlying data to deliver enhanced business intelligence platforms to our clients.  We’ll begin to decorate the PORTIA tree, but more importantly, we’ll ensure that our clients can clearly see the forest and get the top-level view and analysis that will enable them to make better decisions faster.

Dominic Flanagan, Vice President  of Technology

Cloud Computing – It’s Not All About IT

In a recent Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee, he discusses “What Every CEO needs to Know about the Cloud” (click here for summary of article or here for entire article – free registration is required).  The article is an interesting read for any CEO contemplating how cloud computing will change their business.   While the article does a great job of explaining what the cloud is, as well as its benefits and challenges,  the true focus is on who will be defining how the cloud alters the long-term future of a business (hint, if you think it is your IT department, think again).

Every investment management company has either begun implementing or is thinking about moving some parts of their business to the cloud, mostly non-mission critical functions such as basic administration and human resources services.  All these moves are helping departments operate faster, smarter and with fewer resources.  These are largely IT efforts, with the IT department determining when and where the cloud is being utilized.  But, as the HBR article portends, while taking small steps is a good way to get started in the cloud, it is going to take more strategic and innovative thinking to turn the use of the cloud into a competitive advantage.  Who is going to do that thinking?  The IT department that is spread thin and is focused on maintenance and implementation strategies?  According to HBR, it will take innovators and forward thinkers to envision how the cloud can evolve your company beyond the apparent benefits.

Similar to the concept my colleague talks to in a previous blog (click here for post), the business decision to move pieces of your business to the cloud only to help your IT budget is a short-sighted solution. In the previous blog post we discuss the decisions around choosing to outsource some or all of your middle-to-back office and there are many parallels between deciding whether to outsource and whether (and how) to leverage the cloud.  Both are large strategic and operational decisions that require a wide variety of stakeholders to align around the change.  And both need to be thought of as more than just a cost remedy.   They need to be strategic solutions where business leaders translate that strategy into operational tactics that can be executed and supported by IT.

Decisions have to be focused on “How will doing this make my company do business better?”  We believe that executives must take the time to figure out how to change their business to take advantage of cloud computing.  It will be these “out of the box” thinkers that push the cloud vendors to “innovate and differentiate” their offerings.  The companies that leave all the strategic thinking  about the cloud to the IT departments will be left behind.  To quote Andrew McAfee, “How would you feel if your main competitors started pulling away from you …simply by changing their computing infrastructure?  And how much worse would it be if this change created other benefits that are not yet obvious?”

Somewhere in your organization people are working on the cloud (either implementing it or analyzing where it makes sense).  Do you have the right people thinking not only about how it can help efficiency and budgets now, but also about what it may do to the way your business is conducted in the future?  Even if you aren’t thinking about it, know your competitors are.

– Claudine Martin, Product Marketing

PORTIA’s Performance Measurement Tool Scales to 10 Times Current Needs

PORTIA is pleased to announce the release of its latest case study, authored in partnership with Microsoft, discussing how PORTIA’s Performance solution can scale well beyond the needs of the world’s largest asset managers.

A few weeks ago Dominic Flanagan, Vice President of Technology & Product Operations, blogged about how  PORTIA is focused on ensuring our solutions are scalable and how scalability is baked directly into our development process.  We continually test our solutions, both internally and with independent vendors such as Microsoft, and have proven repeatedly that PORTIA is the most flexible, powerful and global middle-to-back office solution.  That is why the world’s largest asset managers use PORTIA to support their operations.

You can view the case study on Microsoft’s website by clicking here.  Also, be sure to read Dominic’s blog on how PORTIA ensures its solutions continually outperform.  We look forward to demonstrating how PORTIA can exceed the operational needs of asset managers.

-Matt Bellias, Director of Strategy and Marketing

Performance, Scalability, Feathers and Bricks

Which weighs more – a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?  In PORTIA’s Performance & Scalability team, we don’t spend too much time thinking about tons of feathers or bricks, but we do spend time thinking about the tons of data that PORTIA and PORTIA Perform handles in real time.  We know that PORTIA and PORTIA Perform can easily handle the volumes of data we see in our current client base, so we focus on testing and optimizing both performance and scalability over data sets that are multiples of the size of our largest client’s data.  This ensures that we stay well ahead of client needs and can handle those times when our clients see sudden and substantial growth in volume through mergers, acquisitions, rapid organic business growth, etc.

We take performance and scalability very seriously – we have a development team specifically focused on this area of architecture and development, and we have a performance and scale process that layers directly into our overall product lifecycle process.  We give performance and scale the same weight of consideration as any functional enhancements to our solutions.  This means that we work these types of improvements from early requirements discussions through to delivery and deployment of each version of the software, so that we continuously measure and improve. 

In addition to our continuous improvement model, we engage in specific deep-dive efforts when we upgrade any underlying software or hardware that may affect performance.  For example, we recently upgraded to the latest version of SQL Server (2008 R2), so we executed one of these deep dives by taking PORTIA Perform to the lab to measure and optimize performance and scalability on this platform. 

In our preparation for a lab, we build a database with a volume of data that is similar to a typical client data set with good coverage of security types and a mix of positions and transactions over those security types to represent comprehensive coverage of equity, fixed income, and derivatives trading activity.  Then we increase that database to a multiple of its size so that we are testing volumes of data that are well beyond those of our current clients.  In other words… tons of data.  For our recent test with Perform at the lab, we increased the database to ten times the size of our largest client database.

With our database loaded with tons of data, and our test scripts prepared to scale up our processing with tons more data, we ran through a very structured three-step process at the lab where we execute iterative cycles of the following steps:

 

 

The results of our efforts were very rewarding.  Running a data set that was ten times larger than any large client database, we optimized Perform to run four times faster in consuming data and fifteen times faster in producing data for extracts.  This is an impressive result in terms of both scaling to large volumes and maintaining good performance in processing over that large scale.  

So, a ton of feathers really does weigh the same as a ton of bricks.  And we can assure you that, with PORTIA and PORTIA Perform running your middle-to-back office operations, a ton of data will always feel lighter than either. 

-Dominic Flanagan, Vice President of Technology & Product Operations