Thomson Financial has signed a multi-year alliance with Microsoft to further optimize its PORTIA portfolio management system for the Microsoft platform. This alliance will deliver middle- to back-office solutions for the worldwide financial community built using the latest Microsoft technology, including the Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Server System.
That’s good news for ING Investment Management, which has recently moved its PORTIA operations to Microsoft and Intel.
“We have been migrating all our products to Microsoft where we can,” explained Brian Oaks, AVP of the Information Technology, Systems Administration group at ING Investment Management. By optimizing PORTIA on the Microsoft platform, Thomson will enable customers to increase the strategic value of their IT investments while reducing complexity and cost.
“We do financial management and use PORTIA as our central back-office system,” said Oaks. Trading is done on three front-office systems for equities, fixed income and money markets. The transactions are reformatted and sent back to PORTIA which acts as the repository for all ING Investment Management’s accounts.
Oaks, a long-time user of PORTIA, is pleased with the software. He has been working on the PORTIA system since 1983, before PORTIA was part of Thomson, and back when the investment company was a division of Aetna Life and Casualty.
“We stay with PORTIA because the system meets our needs across the board; we are happy with the functionality it provides and the level of support we get from Thomson.”
As the firm moved more and more of its applications to a Microsoft platform, the investment firm approached Thomson and said it would like to move onto SQL Server. Experienced in converting records from legacy databases to SQL, Thomson agreed to help with the task.
“We converted the data four times, did an extensive amount of testing, and then ran the two databases in parallel before we moved over to SQL for full production on the fourth time.”
ING Investment Management used the move to Microsoft to install powerful new Intel-based hardware – ProLiant DL Servers with four 2.8 gigahertz XEON Processors, each with two megabytes of cache and eight gigabytes of RAM running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. With the move to ProLiant Servers, ING instituted clustering on-site and real-time replication to an off-site location, which has significantly improved data security.
“We were very pleased with what we got,” said Oaks. “The performance on reports and extracts ranged from a 7-8 times increase in processing speeds, up to 10 times in certain cases. How much was hardware and how much was SQL Server we will never know, but the combination led to very good performance results.”
“The whole process we went through with Thomson was very, very positive.” Thomson’s alliance with Microsoft should deliver further benefits to customers like ING, according to David Littlewood, worldwide managing director, Financial Services, at Microsoft.
“Having Thomson move such an important and recognizable solution as PORTIA to the Microsoft platform represents a major strategic opportunity for us and for our mutual customers,” explained Littlewood. “This move reinforces the understanding that our products and platform are scalable, reliable and trusted for critical business applications. And, when a key partner like Thomson wants to revitalize such a high-profile solution, they know they can gain a competitive edge in both performance and economics by building that solution on the Microsoft platform, and pass those benefits along to our mutual customers. PORTIA and Microsoft together provide our customers with an asset management solution with unbeatable performance, reliability and cost advantages.”
From its vantage point, Thomson also sees big advantages.
“By deepening the relationship between Thomson and Microsoft we will be able to lead with solutions that combine the strength of the latest Microsoft technologies and Thomson Financial’s unparalleled understanding of the needs of the financial manager,” said Christen Bremner, VP of Product, Thomson Financial.
“Thomson is responding in a very positive manner to their client needs,” added Kenny McBride, managing director for securities and capital markets at Microsoft, “by embracing the paradigm of service oriented architecture. They will build on Microsoft .NET and use XML functionality in the new versions of PORTIA. As a result, their clients will find it easier to integrate PORTIA into the whole infrastructure of the investment process.”
The alliance will also involve collaboration between Microsoft and Thomson Financial software architects in designing, building, and testing new versions of and functionality for Thomson PORTIA.
www.ING.com
www.Thomson.com