ITRS Group

Business challenge

Marshall Wace is one of Europe’s leading hedge fund managers combining traditional ‘manager-led’ investing with process-driven strategies. Although dedicated to delivering a quick response to changing business needs, the firm had no visibility across the trade lifecycle and was struggling to manage email system alerts effectively as a result.

The Geneos solution

Marshall Wace selected ITRS Geneos to provide a coordinated global view of all its systems and infrastructure which amount to 100 applications located across 150 servers in London, Hong Kong and the US. Colour-coded visualisations and pop-up alerts allow the application support team to see issues at a glance freeing them to make small fixes that, previously, were the responsibility of the application’s original developers. They, in turn, are now able to focus on building new solutions that move the business forward.

“Geneos has provided a quantum leap in terms of pulling everything together,” said Chris Stanton, Marshall Wace’s co-head of development. “When a service goes down or reports an error, we can find out what might have caused the fault, what's happened in the past and what the leading indicators are.”

Business benefits

• comprehensive monitoring of a wide range of systems, including the industry-standard Thomson Reuters Management Data System, log files, SQL Server and MySQL databases and numerous in-house applications
• quick identification of issues allows affected parts of the business to be immediately informed before they experience service outage
  ‘Sunrise checking’ enables teams in different time zones to ensure vital systems are ready to trade at the start of a new day leaving fewer overnight issues for the incoming team to deal with
• easy access through Geneos Active Console to knowledge-based articles that help staff resolve faults more quickly
• staff have more time to look for better resolutions to common problems rather than simply fire-fighting each event