Software as a Service (SaaS) is seeing increased uptake from Buy-Side firms including Charles River clients seeking to improve operations and provide better support to the front and middle office. With the ongoing evolution and complexity of investment management technology, internal IT organizations find it difficult to keep critical applications up-to-date, supply adequate data, and properly configure and maintain them on an ongoing basis. For many onsite Charles River IMS clients, migrating completely to our SaaS delivery model as part of their next version upgrade is the quickest, most effective and efficient approach.
Charles River experts follow a simple upgrade methodology to implement Charles River IMS as a hosted service:
- Create a project plan – Review project objectives and resources, identify potential data gaps and opportunities for strategic as well as incremental upgrade benefits, and estimate the time and effort required for the upgrade
- Provision the hosting environments – Order and configure the Test, Production, and Disaster Recovery environments and configure connectivity
- Perform technical upgrade – Load and upgrade a copy of the client’s database at Charles River’s secure facilities, leveraging state of the art infrastructure and system expertise
- Activate new features – Consult with the client to identify new capabilities and data sets they wish to access, and configure the system and workflows accordingly
- Replace customizations with native capability – Review database triggers and other client-specific customizations and replace as appropriate with new Charles River IMS capabilities
- Revise custom reports – Review any client-specific reports and revise as needed
- Configure FIX connectivity and interfaces –Identify, configure and test all FIX connections and other interfaces
- User testing – Work with the client to perform rigorous user acceptance testing
- Go-Live – once testing is complete, the client goes live on the latest software version, delivered as a service hosted by Charles River.
Charles River’s proven approach to implementing our SaaS-based delivery model ensures standardization, streamlines the process and helps clients capture significant added value for end users.
Read more about our SaaS-based solution.