QUODD Leverages Cloud to Drive Growth and Profitability

QUODD Financial Information Services, a Financeware company, is a global financial market data provider. QUODD, like many IT organizations, leveraged a managed services provider with colocation services for its IT infrastructure. QUODD's applications were deployed on a mixture of virtual machines on VMware hypervisor and standalone servers on Intel hardware. 

The nature of QUODD’s financial business application requires a high-quality, low-latency, multicast IP distribution network. This allows QUODD to provide its customers with real-time market data.

QUODD’s current IT infrastructure strategy was too costly to support its growth and acquisition initiatives. The on-premise hardware budgeting and refresh cycles were not the best financial model for QUODD's capacity requirements. QUODD also wanted to accelerate the modernization of its proprietary applications and look for innovation opportunities which were limited by current colocation partners and managed service providers. 

QUODD needed to find a solution that reduced the operational cost related to its six datacenters and be flexible enough to support new company acquisitions as well as divestitures. QUODD considered public cloud as a solution, however, its requirement for low latency and support for multicast network streams limited the available options. 

Gregory Reisert, a Converge Client Executive with extensive market data experience, identified that a traditional IT solution was not aligned with QUODD’s future growth goals. Converge recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the cloud provider of choice due to the fact that AWS could address QUODD’s strategic goals around company growth, improved EBITDA, and innovation driven by modernization. 

Converge identified the key to successfully migrating QUODD’s current workload was support of multicast network streams along with an education and operational model that established a comfortable timeline for migration and use of AWS.

The Converge AWS specialist team quickly established why AWS was the best solution by conducting a proof of concept of AWS Transient Gateway Services to address the multicast network streams requirement. 

Converge created a migration plan that included an initial assessment and discovery session that produced a comprehensive ROI output for the client to ensure the financial benefits would be realized. A prescriptive learning program was created for QUODD which included items such as an AWS Immersion Day to base-line the team’s knowledge on the primary AWS services that would be used and Converge’s Cloud Advisory program so cost optimization and governance best practices were implemented early. 

The overall migration plan included AWS Landing Zone creation and the use of AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS for storage, AWS GuardDuty for threat detection, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail for monitoring and logging.

With Converge and AWS, QUODD now provides enhanced market data services to its customers. Innovating with AWS has also extended to QUODD's customer facing applications, which are now available in AWS Marketplace. 

The AWS migration plan created by Converge for QUODD:

• Eliminated capital expenditures associated with hardware refreshes
• Improved security, compliance, and operational resilience
  • AWS Shared Security Model
  • Consistent monitoring and logging
• Modernization platform that leverages AWS innovation in financial services and potential partnership with market data providers in AWS
• Flexible IT platform that supports organic growth, acquisition, and eliminates stranded IT cost associated to divestures