Karen Geiger joined Advent Software in 1999, soon after graduating from Santa Clara University in California. Steve Leivent came aboard in 2000, soon after graduating from Rowan University in New Jersey. Two decades later—a span that included the bombshell 2015 acquisition of Advent by SS&C Technologies—the two have seen numerous technological advancements cause disruption for the company, but none so existential as that of cloud.

In the institutional asset management and hedge fund world, Advent is best known for the Geneva portfolio management system, the Moxy order management system, the APX client management solution, and Genesis, the company’s portfolio construction and rebalancing offering. Of those fairly-ubiquitous tools, only Genesis is cloud native. It’s going to take time, but the company’s delay in adopting cloud more broadly is now set to change.

“We’d like to do a transformation where we can offer an entire suite that is cloud-based, whether that means building additional cloud-native capabilities, or transforming some of our legacy solutions, like a Geneva, to be able to plug-and-play with a much more open cloud platform,” says Geiger, co-general manager of SS&C Advent, along with Leivent. “This would be a multi-year endeavor, but we’re starting by building off what we already have with Genesis, and extending that.”

While Genesis does rebalancing and order creation, Geiger says that there are opportunities to expand further into the front and middle offices thanks to the platform’s software-as-a-service delivery mechanism. More than that, though, the company is considering how to move an offering like, say, Moxy—which SS&C Advent can currently host for users—and make it a more cohesive front-to-back experience via the cloud.

Geiger says the way that she thinks about this transition is a user can pick and choose which components of the Advent offering make the most sense for them. In this scenario, certain specialized components might fit better for a hedge fund rather than a traditional asset manager, but those pieces would nonetheless “seamlessly talk to each other” so that users could scale up or down depending on their needs.

So while Genesis was the first cloud-native platform under Advent’s asset management umbrella, the long-term goal is to have every platform deployed via a SaaS model. To accomplish this, the company is coming at the overhaul from two angles, Geiger says. The first will look at Genesis and see which capabilities can be extended to the front and middle offices. At the same time, Advent will look at the legacy platforms—which can be hosted via SS&C Advent’s outsourcing business—and make sure that users have the same experience in the cloud as they would via an on-premise installation.

“So we’re looking to really transform that so that it isn’t just a lifting-out of your software into our infrastructure, but having a more cohesive front-to-back experience,” she says. “But we’re coming at it from two angles and it’s a longer-term initiative.”

While the company is still working out the exact form that this platform transformation will take, it’s not like SS&C Advent is starting from scratch. Beyond the lessons learned from the launch of Genesis—and the fact that the platform can serve as the backbone for future development—Advent also has its Outsourcing Services unit.

“In the future, I don’t think that clients are going to care if they’re multi-tenant SaaS applications, as long as they can access the data and systems in the same way. It’s our half-step toward the future of Advent, which is all-cloud-native systems.

Steve Leivent

Leivent, who oversees the vendor’s outsourcing business, along with Advent’s wealth management and advisory services division, says that today, somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of new sales made by SS&C Advent have “some flavor of our hosting and outsourcing services,” which is a “dynamic” change from just five years ago.

He says outsourcing services can serve as a bridge to a future state that’s comprised entirely of cloud-native and SaaS-delivered solutions. While buy-side firms still prefer SS&C Advent’s single-tenant, dedicated hosting environment, he believes that will change as asset managers and hedge funds become more comfortable with cloud-based tools.

“In the future, I don’t think that clients are going to care if they’re multi-tenant SaaS applications, as long as they can access the data and systems in the same way,” Leivent says. “It’s our half-step toward the future of Advent, which is all-cloud-native systems.”

Connecting the Pieces

SS&C Technologies has grown through the M&A market (comprising more than 50 acquisitions over the last 25 years). Its voracious appetite for acquisitions has brought DST Global Solutions, Citi’s Alternative Investor Services, Varden Technologies, Primatics Financial, Algorithmics, and, among many others, Eze Software into the SS&C universe, in addition to Advent.

This acquisitive nature, combined with Advent’s push toward the cloud, begs the question: Will this move to the cloud also help bring greater uniformity across these various other companies where, one day in the future, these pieces are all accessed from one centralized cloud hub?

Geiger says it’s a balancing act, but that she doesn’t see the company incorporating “a very strict, top-down mandate” where every entity has to “come together on a single platform”. The reason for that, though, is because it would stunt innovation. A project of that magnitude would suck the oxygen (and budget) out of the room, and would make it harder for these companies to respond to specific client needs.

With that said, Geiger says there are “really complimentary and positive collaborations” happening between the Advent team and other units at SS&C Technologies. For example, Advent and Eze are working to tighten the integration between the Eze OMS and Geneva, while Advent handles outsourcing services for Eze Eclipse, the cloud-native investment management platform.

Advent is also collaborating with DST on a project in the UK, where DST is helping Advent to conduct a back-office lift out for its managed service delivery in the region. Additionally, Advent is talking with the team at Algorithmics to see how it can incorporate the latter’s risk analytics tools within Genesis.

Geiger adds that cloud adoption will make it easier for the company to bring new solutions to market, and to adopt, implement, and deploy tools within SS&C, as well as partner with third-parties that users want to connect with. Getting this piece right across the range of Advent solutions will be the top priority going forward.

“In the past, we may have thought of Geneva as one family and then on the asset management side we have our APX, Moxy, and Genesis platform—which we’re actually now starting to call the Advent Investment Suite—but we’re really starting to see the lines blurring between those two. So we’re looking at setting ourselves up in a way that when we build technology, [these releases] can service users across those markets, and we can do it once and provide benefits across those different channels.”