Case Study - Financial

About Kingdon Capital Management

Founded in 1983 by Mark Kingdon, Kingdon Capital Management offers Global Long/Short Equity and Long/Short Credit strategies. The firm’s specialized investment research teams are focused by industry, region or asset class and its investment approach incorporates top-down macroeconomic and bottom-up fundamental research with a focus on liquidity, diversification and dynamic exposure management. The firm’s diverse global client base includes prominent endowments, foundations, corporate and public pension funds, family offices and financial institutions, with managed assets totaling $2.6 billion. www.kingdon.com

Challenge: Provide unobtrusive support on the trading floor

The IT Group at Kingdon Capital Management is in charge of providing crucial system support to international traders around the clock as well as managing the company's IT infrastructure during business hours. The group consists of 4 support staff and operates from a centralized office, supporting approximately 200 desktops and 25 servers.

The chief challenge facing the IT Group is performing all of their work - from common tasks to resolving a gamut of issues - without disturbing the users, whose uninterrupted workflow is critical to the daily operation of the busy securities trading firm in New York City, NY.

In the world of finance, time is of the essence. Having to travel from office to office and navigate multiple floors in order to perform common tasks and troubleshoot issues on individual machines was time-consuming and inefficient. Additionally, because each technician was often tied up on a different floor or office, it proved difficult for the team to come together to confer on more demanding support calls. The IT Group also found it indispensable to improve their diagnostics capabilities in order to be proactive in both preventing and resolving issues.

Solution

"It was essential for us to find a system management solution that would allow us to perform our daily tasks remotely and unobtrusively, streamline our efforts to handle a wider variety of support issues and increase our call efficiency," explained Vince Rooney, Chief Technology Officer.

After evaluating other solutions, the IT Group chose Goverlan. "We looked at a few solutions that were offered several years ago and most provided some variation of remote access, but there were limitations on what you could do once connected and the performance was often terrible and intrusive. Goverlan was the first product that we found that offered a deeper ability to perform diagnostics with a light foot print," added Rooney.

With small (<5MB) agents that can be automatically installed and maintained, the team could get started putting Goverlan to work.

Results: The IT group increases first-call resolution by 95%

The IT Group now uses the powerful remote access capabilities of Goverlan's Remote Control to access their systems quickly and securely and the Goverlan Suite's extended remote management features to perform support tasks and resolve issues. "Having the ability to take over a user's desktop saves us time of traveling between floors as well as allows us to multitask and confer with each other on difficult issues," noted Rooney.

"With Goverlan we've increased our first-call resolution by 95%. In many cases we can also perform tasks in the background with minimal or no interruption to the user, who can continue to use their phone or manage paperwork undisturbed. Before Goverlan, we had to visit each user's desktop and interrupt their workflow as we worked at their computer to resolve the issue," he added.

Goverlan's fast access to real-time, detailed machine/user information - without the need for user interaction - has made the IT Group better able to respond to support calls by getting to the root cause of the problem with more speed and precision, greatly increasing call efficiency. The team can quickly detect all logged-in workstations in real time and get a clear picture of the status of a machine. "We now have the ability to drill down into various aspects of the desktop OS when troubleshooting issues, which greatly expedites and streamlines our process. When we access a machine, we'll go through and drill down on their machine and take a look at what processes and programs are running, and we can also check things like system stats and memory utilization. In our fast-paced environment, being able to see everything that is happening at a machine allows us to hit the ground running," elaborated Rooney.

Conclusion: Greener, more efficient IT

The Kingdon Capital Management IT Group has made Goverlan an integral element in their mission of supporting the firm's IT infrastructure. "With Goverlan, we have saved so much time and effort; because we can perform our tasks and troubleshoot more efficiently, our staff can also be on hand to handle calls while performing other tasks. Goverlan continues to get better with each new version and has become a staple in our environment," concluded Rooney.