Management

How One Hedge Fund Is Reinventing Itself With the Right Digital Strategy

Technology alone can’t deliver the benefits of digital transformation.

Rajiv Jain is a Field CIO/CTO for the Financial Services Vertical at CDW.

Frank Fiore is a Financial Services Regional Manager with CDW.

Digital transformation has tremendous potential to drive efficiencies, streamline processes and delight customers. It’s no surprise that 89 percent of global organizations say they are undergoing a digital transformation. In the financial services industry especially, where fierce competition can cost-inefficient organizations market share and narrow their profit margins, well-executed digital transformation projects are a requirement for success.

But many such projects are not well-executed. As noted by the Harvard Business Review, companies have captured just 31 percent of expected revenue increases and seen only 25 percent of expected cost savings as a result of these efforts. According to KPMG’s 2023 U.S. Technology Survey, the majority of American businesses have not seen increased profitability or performance from transformation initiatives.

The disconnect? Implementation. While there’s no shortage of tools and technologies, solutions alone can’t deliver on digital expectations. Here’s how we’re helping one New York-based hedge fund make the most of its transformation with CDW.

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Solving Storage Complexity With Fewer, Better Solutions

The driving force behind digital transformation was the arrival of a new head of infrastructure in mid-2022. After reviewing the IT environment, it became clear that the company had significant layers of complexity around data storage specifically. In addition, the growing size of infrastructure deployments coupled with service-level agreements (SLAs) that struggled to keep pace with changing hedge fund needs made it clear that something had to give.

Our work with the company started with a comprehensive assessment of its storage environment and options. We took an in-depth look at existing infrastructure and how it impacted operations. The organization was using 10 different storage systems, and we performed a technical evaluation of each. We sought to understand each solution’s role in the environment to determine where consolidation could be made safely.

We recommended reducing the total number of systems to reduce the overall complexity of the environment. The client liked the idea and implemented Pure Storage to help streamline storage operations.

FIND OUT: What banks need to know about cloud platforms.

Going Beyond Storage with Infrastructure as Code, AI and More

With storage streamlined and simplified, the groundwork was laid to implement future-state solutions — tools and technologies that would help the hedge fund navigate the changing world of investment and wealth management. We’re continuing to work with the organization on wide range of projects, including:

Infrastructure automation. By implementing Infrastructure as Code, we’re helping the hedge fund automate key processes. This automation reduces the amount of manual effort required and sets the stage for more in-depth analysis of financial data.
Hybrid cloud landing zones. Another area of focus for the hedge fund is the hybrid cloud. The move is ongoing; we’re creating hybrid cloud “landing zones” that allow the company to shift its data and services securely as it expands into hybrid cloud.
Artificial intelligence. While specific AI plans are still in development, CDW helped build the framework for success with the deployment of high-performance NVIDIA GPUs. These processing units offer enough power and throughput to support the hedge fund in whatever AI projects it decides to pursue.

DISCOVER: The solutions and services that are helping financial organizations.

Digital transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. Technologies and tools provide the power and performance necessary to improve operations. How they’re connected and implemented across IT infrastructure, meanwhile, is the difference between one-off benefits and long-term transformation.

CDW offers full-stack, end-to-end services that help financial companies improve digital environments. From initial assessments to recommendations, deployments and support, CDW helped one hedge fund take on transformation and continues to support its success.

See how CDW can help your business deliver on digital transformation.

This article is part of BizTech's EquITy blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter.