10 October 2011, London: ITRS Group plc, the leading global provider of predictive, real-time monitoring and proactive application performance management products to the world’s financial community, announced today that Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s leading hedge fund managers, has selected ITRS Geneos for application and infrastructure monitoring across the entire organisation. ITRS Geneos will be used to monitor and provide metrics for 100 applications on 150 servers in its London headquarters and offices in Hong Kong and Connecticut.
Chris Stanton, co-head of development at Marshall Wace, said: “When we began our evaluation and selection process it became apparent pretty quickly that, in comparison to other solutions, Geneos would suit our needs. Within a month it proved it could monitor everything we wanted and within three we had it up and running, monitoring a large number of our systems. We initially tried to set up our own central application support team and funnel all alerts to this team. However, this meant we had no visibility across the trade lifecycle and led to a very fractured approach. We soon realised we needed to create a coordinated global support function providing a complete view of all systems, with the ability to deliver support to all our offices. This looked an extremely arduous task as so many of the systems we looked at could only monitor one aspect of our infrastructure but not another ... until we were introduced to Geneos.” He added: “Going forward, we’d like to capture metrics to support more sophisticated capacity planning as well as move logging, currently provided inside the application, so we use the full functionality of Geneos and its visualisation tools more effectively. Meanwhile, we’re confident we’re the first to know when there’s an issue and can communicate clearly to the business what is happening and what we are doing to fix it.”
Kevin Covington, CEO of ITRS Group, said: “We are delighted that Marshall Wace has selected ITRS Geneos for their complete business monitoring. We are eagerly looking forward to working with them to expand the benefits they accrue from their use of Geneos.”
ITRS Geneos allows the Marshall Wace team to have a business view of their complete infrastructure. This gives their developers the ability to quickly identify an issue, communicate with their traders and address it before it becomes a serious problem. This results in the team being able to proactively and rapidly resolve common issues so they can then concentrate on the new development which is the Marshall Wace trademark.
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Alla Lapidus
Moonlight Media Ltd.
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About Marshall Wace
Since the launch of its flagship strategy in 1998, Marshall Wace has established itself as one of Europe’s foremost hedge fund managers. It is dedicated to building sustainable competitive advantage within the investment management industry and strives continuously to enhance all stages of the investment process to achieve this aim. Globally, Marshall Wace is committed to building a business that will offer investors the benefits of both manager-led and process-driven strategies, extracting alpha and beta from opportunities arising across global equity markets.
Marshall Wace brings together two complementary approaches to equity long/short fund management. First, traditional, fundamental long/short investing (“manager-led”) and, secondly, process-driven strategies, based on the unique alpha capture system, Marshall Wace TOPS (“MW TOPS”). Both approaches draw on the unrivalled information edge derived from the dynamic driving the relationships with those providing investment recommendations to the firm. This has created a revolutionary and virtuous circle that aligns the interests of investor, fund manager and service provider.
Within the alternative investment community, Marshall Wace was also instrumental in the creation of the Hedge Fund Standards Board which has been set up to establish and maintain a set of voluntary best practice standards for hedge fund managers including disclosure, valuation, risk management, fund governance and shareholder conduct.
For more information, please visit: http://www.mwam.com/Public/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fIndex.aspx
About ITRS
ITRS Group is the leading provider of risk mitigation solutions to global financial institutions. It leads the way in a new discipline which extends real-time monitoring into a comprehensive operational and service management solution. Providing innovative businesses with the visibility necessary to identify, analyse and mitigate risk, ITRS Group has been recognised through industry awards for its innovation and customer support. ITRS’s products are specifically designed to reduce service disruption, improve IT efficiency, and ensure that critical operational processes are executed as planned, protecting against both business reputation and trading risks.
ITRS delivers proactive, predictive real-time monitoring and management with specialist interfaces for over 100 key third-party trading and risk applications, including core financial market trading applications, services and execution venues – a prerequisite for effective system control. A unified view and full visibility of complex environments is provided through the Geneos dashboard, giving a complete end-to-end view of all systems. Disparate data is aggregated, creating a single source of actionable business intelligence, giving the ability to predict and act to prevent problems, enhancing risk management and minimising latency, all at ultra-high speeds.
Established in 1997, ITRS has offices in London, New York and Hong Kong supporting clients worldwide including banks, brokers, exchanges, hedge funds and data vendors. ITRS has over 600 Geneos installations, implemented in 60 leading financial institutions, including eight of the top ten global investment banks.
Read more about Marshall Wace and how they are using the ITRS Geneos solution here
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