Charles River adds AWS to build out multi-cloud strategy

Buy-side investment management system provider Charles River Development (CRD) is expanding its cloud strategy after signing an agreement to use Amazon Web Services (AWS). This will allow CRD, which is owned by State Street, to deploy a multi-cloud strategy, as it signed with Microsoft Azure in 2019.

“If you are multi-cloud, you have to accept that you’re either going to have to build on specific technologies that maybe Amazon offers, and then when you’re operating in Azure, you’re using a different technology stack. Our strategy is to be cloud-agnostic,” says Gerald Lilly, CTO of CRD.

The move will allow CRD to meet clients where they are—whether that be Azure or AWS—so they can connect to the vendor without having to make infrastructure changes.

“Many of our clients have already moved in the AWS direction, so it’s advantageous for us to have multiple cloud platforms. Some of our clients are using Azure, so that’s convenient. A lot of clients also have investment in AWS, so for us to be in that space lowers the barrier of adoption and reduces the amount of friction for them to adopt our solutions,” Lilly says “It’s important for us to have that two-cloud solution, so that we are meeting our clients where they already operate.”

The move points to a broader trend in the market as more technology providers are looking to expand their legacy platforms to be cloud-enabled. It will also help CRD to roll out new products more nimbly. For example, the vendor is developing a new iteration of its investment book of record (Ibor) that will incorporate cloud-native features, says Randy Bullard, CRD’s global head of wealth.

“We are well into the journey of migrating our customers onto the cloud, but we are a little earlier in our journey to implement cloud-specific engineering features into the product,” Bullard says. “First, we need to get our customers into the cloud, but our ‘next-generation’ Ibor team has been working in parallel to that, so that when our customers are ready, the product is ready.”

CRD will be ready to select clients for the new Ibor later this year, and its objective is to have all customers in Azure by 2024.

The vendor’s relationship with Microsoft began in 2019, when CRD announced that it would be relocating its Investment Management System (IMS) from cloud provider Rackspace Technology’s platform to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure. It was an easy decision for CRD, as the front-end of its wealth management platform is written C#, the Microsoft programming language, and the back-end of the system in Microsoft SQL.

“Our customers have been able to get adequate performance out of legacy architecture, but like everything in the industry, a lot of the traditional technologies have limits. We are looking forward at growing data volumes, and we have to make that data investible and accessible. Legacy technologies are holding that back, so it is important for the industry—and for Charles River—to implement a lot of these ‘next-generation’ technologies in the cloud that can break through barriers and allow us to deliver an increase in scale and efficiency for our customers,” Bullard says.

Easier said than done

Migrating over to the cloud is easier said than done, and while vendors like to brush off the challenges associated with embracing the cloud, it’s not without its difficulties.

John Keddy, senior principal at advisory firm Aite-Novarica, says that companies looking to go down this path could encounter a number of issues. One of the primary limitations, he says, exists within the firms themselves. “You would think that IT people love the cloud, but my experience has been that legacy IT people are the most difficult to get moving along. There are challenges, but not just in the technology, in people too, because the cloud is a really different way of thinking about technology, and a lot of people can’t make that transition, or don’t want to,” he says.

“Five years ago, nobody wanted to talk about cloud. Today, everybody is talking about cloud,” Keddy says. “But there are many barriers—technologies are not magical. They are well thought through by the time they are deployed, but it’s still real work. It doesn’t change any of that human equation.”