How do you satisfy customer demands for flexible, agile service

While preserving a satisfying user experience and strict regulatory compliance?

Delivering trusted desktop software instead as-a-service for better performance and flexible costs

As told by Richard Laugesen, Head of Strategic Vendor Management, SimCorp

In partnership with Michael Skøtt, Associate Director, Technical Practice Specialist and Cloud Advisor for SimCorp, Kyndryl

Investment firms worldwide use SimCorp Dimension software to manage their customer portfolios. While these firms highly value SimCorp’s flagship software, owning and running data centers are a costly, growing distraction from their core business.

SimCorp understood that financial services markets were shifting from traditional licensed on-premises software models to software-as-a-service (SaaS) models to reduce operational burdens and improve agility for the end customer. When he took over as Head of Strategic Vendor Management at Simcorp, Richard Laugesen committed to SimCorp providing their customers with better, more flexible experiences. And while pivoting to SaaS was essential, the move was not without risks, including assuring continued smooth operations and uptime for customers.

“

By providing a SaaS solution, we recognized that we could take the operational headache away from our customers and step up to being a trusted service provider rather than just a vendor.”

Richard Laugesen, Head of Strategic Vendor Management, SimCorp

Turning necessity into opportunities

The SimCorp team recognized that moving to a SaaS model opened up a host of opportunities and benefits. Customers could be relieved of the work of deploying and running Dimension in their own data centers. They would benefit from being able to scale capacity and costs as needed, through services delivered on virtual resources in a private cloud. SimCorp could develop and deliver new features to customers faster, without the often-heavy customer service touch of version upgrades. And companies using SaaS solutions can gain from the expertise and economies of scale that cloud service providers can offer.

The SaaS model would also allow SimCorp to serve a new customer segment of smaller businesses which were without means to deploy and manage their own SimCorp solution.

The benefits both for existing on-premises customers and new prospects were compelling. “The opportunity for our company was clear: We could offer better solutions, at lower cost to our customers, and with increased flexibility and scalability,” said Laugesen.

“

Our vision was to provide a seamless service to investment management firms, so that they can focus on their core business without having to think about owning and operating IT infrastructure.”

Richard Laugesen, Head of Strategic Vendor Management, SimCorp

Meeting highest standards in a highly regulated industry

Operating in some of the most regulated market segments, SimCorp’s customers often need to comply with multiple local, regional and global regulations.

In adopting the new as-a-service software delivery model, SimCorp would need to support the highest standards in availability, security, privacy, cyber-resilience, and recoverability.

“Given the industry we serve, it was vital to create a truly world-class platform for our new SaaS model,” says Laugesen. “As well as meeting or exceeding all of the major global security and privacy standards, we targeted an industry-best recovery time objective and recovery point objective of just 15 minutes.” SimCorp tests all recovery objectives as part of upholding specific Security Level Agreements (SLAs).

In addition to finding a long-term cloud partner capable of meeting its customers’ stringent requirements around security and resilience, SimCorp wanted to ensure rapid onboarding and low-risk migration to the new SaaS platform.

“Our customers have customers in practically every time zone, so a non-disruptive migration and ongoing constant availability were must-haves from the operational perspective,” states Laugesen.

A resilient infrastructure that supports modern business models

Together, SimCorp and Kyndryl designed and built a standardized, automated, fully managed cloud landscape for its SimCorp SaaS Platform. Running on virtualized infrastructure in multiple top-tier data centers across four continents, the Kyndryl solution features cross-site data mirroring for resilience and rapid recoverability.

Each customer’s production environment features two clustered Oracle databases for high availability, replicating asynchronously via Oracle Data Guard to a third database for disaster recovery purposes.

Kyndryl and SimCorp have successfully migrated 20 customers from a wide variety of on-premises environments to SimCorp SaaS Platform, using a detailed playbook and rigorous project management services from Kyndryl Consult to ensure a smooth, low-risk process.

“The Kyndryl solution gives us the control and security of private cloud combined with the flexibility, scalability and cost advantages of public cloud,” says Laugesen. “Working with Kyndryl continues to be a very positive experience: The team always has our backs and steps up when there’s a need for innovation.”

Kyndryl delivers considerable flexibility. In the five years since go-live, the compliance scope has been expanded from Europe-only to include Canada, the U.S., and Australia. Both private dedicated connectivity options and flexibility in the number of processor cores per Oracle database instance for selected customers have been introduced as well.

“

Clients who migrate to SaaS typically see a performance boost of 30 to 40%. Our clients are very happy with the solution because it offers 100% adherence to SLAs without any in-house effort."

Richard Laugesen, Head of Strategic Vendor Management, SimCorp

Investors are pointing to laptops that have investment information stock markets and partners taking notes and analyzing performance data.

What progress looks like

30-40% performance boost for most customers
Fast onboarding of new customers
Fast and easy adjustment of costs and capacity

Thanks to the agility of the cloud model, SimCorp clients can ramp services up and down as business needs change, controlling costs with greater transparency and predictability.

SimCorp SaaS Platform enables clients to eliminate non-core activities such as hosting, operating, maintaining, and upgrading the solution. Instead of worrying about software or hardware, they can focus on faster operations and better customer service.

Clients don’t need to buy, install and configure hardware and software in their own data center — and guided by Kyndryl and a best-practice process framework, they can be up and running in less than one week.

The SimCorp SaaS Platform meets or exceeds numerous global, regional and national standards around security, compliance and privacy, including ISO27001 and NIST SP800-53, and gives clients peace of mind through quarterly disaster-recovery tests.

Looking to the future

SimCorp is developing a hyperscale, everything-as-code version of its software running on Microsoft® Azure®. This option brings more automation and gives customers the ability to spin up their own virtual resources, such as applications, on demand, without a service request. Both the Azure and Kyndryl options are available for new clients.

For smaller customers with less complex demands, this Azure-based option can be optimal. Larger customers or those with complex regulatory needs will likely choose the Kyndryl-managed option instead. And as a Microsoft strategic partner, Kyndryl is ready to assist as SimCorp navigates setting up and managing their customers on Azure.

About SimCorp

Established in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1971, SimCorp serves more than 300 of the world’s leading asset managers, fund managers, asset servicers, pension and insurance funds, wealth managers, central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and treasury firms. Its flagship solution, SimCorp Dimension, is used to by customers to manage more than USD 19 trillion in assets.