CIOIN

K.B. Venkataramanan

CIO, Viteos

"Virtualization has automated document processing, raising the job satisfaction levels my staff."

Executive summary

How Viteos Fund Services, one of the world’s biggest fund administrators keeps its investors and traders informed—
and happy.

The Company: Life in the global financial industry, where billions are moved every second is a rush. And Viteos Fund Services, a US-based fund administrator with delivery centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, was in the middle of it.

The Business Case: The popularity of fund administrators like Viteos has grown over the last few years, especially with the rise of hedge fund scams like the one Bernard Madoff ran. Fund administrators are third-party specialists that do much of the grunt work for fund managers like a mutual fund. “A trader wants to know his profit and loss status within minutes of the market closing so that he can plan his strategy for the next day,” explains K.B. Venkataramanan, CIO, Viteos, one of the top 50 fund administrators in the world.
Viteos also needed to follow various financial regulations of different countries and advice traders to make prudent decisions.  “If traders have extra money after the market closes in London, we have to advise them on where else they can move the money to create the most value,” he says.
The Project: When Venkataraman was given the responsibility of building Viteos’ IT environment, he had to serve two disparate needs: On the one hand his systems needed to be robust to handle an extremely high volume of transactions. On the other hand, they needed to deliver NAV reports to investors, which meant they needed to be highly scalable and accurate. Ventakaraman had to decide whether to build cost-intensive, asynchronous systems, or a single system to address both these needs.
First Steps: Venkataraman decided to virtualize Viteos’ datacenter. “This helped reduce the opex of maintaining heavy infrastructure and allowed us to phase out capex according to need,” he says. By deploying VMs running different operating systems and multiple apps on fewer servers, Viteos increased resource utilization. With this underway, Ventakaraman now concentrated on building linkages between various homegrown and off-the-shelf apps. This he achieved through a unified storage platform with fully automated storage tiering, virtual provisioning, file system de-duplication. 
Ventakaraman also integrated Viteos’ front-end software (MS Share point) with a backend storage solution from EMC. “The Documentum back-end allows me define how many documents I can store and simultaneously reduced my storage backup time. Consequently, as data volumes increase, my response time improves,” he  says.

The Benefits: The system automates document processing allowing both internal staff and clients to access real-time data via dashboards. By automating the process Ventakaraman achieved 30 percent excess capacities and raised the job satisfaction of his employees. “Automation has allowed us to make work a knowledge driven task. It also allows for job enrichment,” says S. Venkataraghavan business head, fund accounting.