Client snapshot

• Specialist in international equity investment.
• Offices in London and New York.
• Founded in 1994

Background

IT support from Silchester’s incumbent partner had become reactive, with systems being implemented to resolve issues on a discrete basis, rather than in any grander, more strategic way.

Silchester was looking to progress with a new partner that could provide strategic IT advice, implementation and support. Silchester looked to Lanware to manage its existing environment initially, and then to move to a hosted environment.

Solution

Lanware implemented a remote working and disaster recovery solution for the organisation based on Citrix technology to provide a full virtual office environment. With an initial strategy to maintain a smooth support transition, Lanware rapidly restored support process stability, and established comprehensive documentation.

Silchester now enjoys a Citrix virtual office environment giving staff the total flexibility to access their desktops securely in any place and time zone. Business continuity is mitigated for with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and Silchester can continue to focus its business operations on managing money and not managing systems.

Lanware is now the leading vendor in the provision of “Managed Community Cloud” within the Asset Management Sector. A Community Cloud is a collaborative effort in which infrastructure is shared between several organisations from a specific community with common concerns such as security, compliance and jurisdiction. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realised.

The two key organisations which Lanware is providing Community Cloud to are Silchester International Investors group (Community of seven fund managers) and Principal Global Investors (Community of three fund managers).

With Community Cloud Lanware gives its FCA regulated clients the capability to drive a balance between ensuring appropriate privacy and giving the individual members the benefits of economies of scale, elasticity in terms of compute and the ability to have their own front end environment which is tailored to their needs.