City Fund Management (CFM) is a $500 million London-based hedge fund regulated by the Financial Services Authority and currently based near Cannon Street in the City of London.
CFM have a London Head Office with space to accommodate 20 staff with another 10 members of staff located in Regional and Global sites.
By working very closely with CFM, Sentronex were able to redesign and reengineer the production IT environment to streamline and consolidate hardware, software and network infrastructure, in order to make their internal operations and processes more efficient. All production servers are hosted offsite at Sentronex’s data centre, with the DR environment hosted in a separately located data centre with network connectivity achieved through MPLS technology, offering full redundancy.
Furthermore, CFM previously looked after their IT internally, but used multiple third party vendors for different elements of their IT infrastructure i.e. telephony, networks and application support. Sentronex proposed to bring the management and support of these areas under one roof.
“The level of customer service we have received from Sentronex has been outstanding. Their staff are all informed and capable, as well as polite and punctual.”
John Jackson, C.E.O.
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Sentronex used itsHelpDeskprocesses to ensure in and out of hours support services could be provided to CFMs on-site and remote users and CFM had just one third party contact for all IT related services.
This solution helped keep costs to a minimum and it provided CFM with the confidence and dependency for production support services from one provider.
Sentronex’s team of industry experts, all hailing from banking and IT backgrounds, were able to understand the needs of the CFM Traders, the business as a whole and the kind of response times required.
Sentronex introduced strict SLAs and KPIs, which would result in penalties if not adhered to. This ensured a high degree of quality and assurance for the client. CFM’s global and regional staff are included as part of this support agreement.
Sentronex’s location so close to the City of London also allows for rapid response times when a physical presence is required by CFM.
IT is the backbone to many financial institutions, and CFM is no exception. They needed a system that could be relied upon at all hours.
The changes made to their production environment improved application and system availability, rendering the overall infrastructure more efficient. This was not only cost effective but time efficient, as the company is able to streamline to a sole vendor.
A good working relationship was built up through Sentronex’s ability to resolve the key issues, as well as an understanding of the financial environment and the core IT requirements.
