theCUBE Live At #OOW14 In The Cisco Booth

When a company spends $750 million and a decade to develop a software platform that can make or break its future, it can’t afford to fall into the all-too-common trap of becoming bogged down with the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. In an effort to avoid that fate, SEI Investments Co. launched a major hardware modernization initiative that its head of IT, Steven Zeh, revealed in a recent interview freed up his department to focus on pushing through with the groundbreaking project.

What started out as a humble research experiment in 2003 grew to become what Zeh described on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE as a comprehensive solution for financial institutions to manage assets across multiple geographic regions with different accounting practices and regulations. The aptly-named Global Wealth Management Platform quickly proved a success after its debut last year, but SEI soon realized that the legacy infrastructure supporting the application can’t effectively address the requirements of European clients: it simply took to long to process trading data.

“Although this is a brand new platform, it still has a batch element,” Zeh explained to theCUBE hosts Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick. “And that batch element, since it depends on US pricing as well as European pricing, the window to run that process is much more narrow for our UK clients than our US clients.”

The need to shorten computation cycles sent SEI scurrying to scale its server environment, but the upgrade soon proved impractical. When the challenge first reared its head, the company was still running a legacy proprietary deployment based on the PARC processing architecture that Oracle Oracle obtained as part of the $7.3 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2010.

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Rather than shouldering the cost and complexity of trying to add more capacity to the aging installation, the firm made the decision to switch to a commodity x86 architecture. After reviewing the available products on the market, Zeh said that SEI settled on Cisco Systems Inc’s UCS series of converged infrastructure platform. The series combines combines blade servers and networking equipment into an integrated bundle that requires minimal tinkering to prepare and comes with built-in management software that makes it possible to administrate every component from the same place.

“What Cisco is doing with UCS and what Oracle and other firms are doing on the storage side is continuing to consolidate all these components, so you’re managing the ecosystem not managing individual components and trying to engineer this yourself,” Zeh said. He added that the growing trend of infrastructure convergence is almost reminiscent of the situation in 1970s and 1980s, when integrated mainframes ruled the enterprise computing landscape.

But other than the fact that the different infrastructure components are fusing back together, the corporate network is unrecognizable from the days of big iron and punch cards. Cloud computing and analytics in particular are pushing the market further and further away from the old way of doing business, but Zeh admitted SEI’s customers have been somewhat slow to adapt.

“That consolidation that they’re able to do around books and business on a single unified platform is where they’re spending a lot of their energy,” he said. “They’re not really exploiting the data yet, we anticipate that they will, but they’re not exploiting it yet.” Despite of that sluggishness, however, the executive insisted that the market has come an incredibly long way already, momentum he sees continuing into the future as trends such as converged infrastructure accelerate.