Tag Archive: Advent


Does Your Investment Firm Need APX?

Filed under: APX, Axys, Data Conversion, Portfolio Management Systems — 1 Comment
June 29, 2012

In 2005, Advent released the first version of Advent Portfolio Exchange (APX). This paved the way for enterprise users to take Advent more seriously, while reassuring rapidly growing firms that APX would service their future needs and provide support for legacy requirements. Initially, this change was fine with many of the Axys users that have historically comprised Advent’s established userbase, but after years of baseline Axys updates and Advent’s predominant emphasis on APX, the patience of some Axys users has worn thin.

Today Axys users likely fit into one of four camps:

  1. They are planning to move to APX in the near future.
  2. They understand their options well enough, but don’t think the benefits of moving to APX outweigh the costs.
  3. They simply don’t care about APX or competing products – just as long as Axys keeps doing what they need, everything is fine.
  4. They are frustrated by Advent’s perceived abandonment of their business segment and are either actively seeking a replacement to Axys or in the process of converting to a new system.

I have repeatedly been told that owning a self-hosted version of APX is 2-3 times more expensive than Axys, but don’t take my word for it.  Advent’s pricing changes regularly.  Call Advent and get a quote.   Early on, APX conversions were very expensive, and some firms were quoted six-figure conversion costs.  Although these costs have been reduced substantially, APX is still significantly more expensive than Axys.

In the past, conversions were much more complex and time-consuming.  The primary issue seemed to be the normalization of a wide variety of Axys data.  As APX has evolved, Advent and the conversion utility within APX have created efficiencies in the conversion process.  In a recent conversation with a client, who is now considering the move from Axys to APX, I learned that Advent took copies of their Axys files and was able to demo APX 4.x with representative data from their firm in about a week.

In addition to the difference in the software cost, Advent recommends that APX users host the app in a traditional database server and application server configuration.  Some users may opt to host IIS on a separate server as well.  Currently, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) simply host Axys on their primary file server.

Why would a firm running Axys want to pay the premium for APX?

The answer is improved security, infrastructure, and functionality that meets the expectations of those with higher technological standards – historically enterprise users, not SMBs.  APX promised this from day one, but APX v1 was, well, version 1.  I sat in on a couple dog and pony shows for APX when it was first introduced.  In one, the presenter abruptly but politely disconnected a conference call with one of their early “testimonial” users when the conversation went in an unexpected direction.  At Advent’s conference in Orlando, more time than Advent would have liked was spent on the topic of APX latency, but these types of issues can be experienced with any v1 product covering as much ground as APX.

One of the most valuable benefits of Advent’s portfolio accounting systems is the maturity of their products.  This maturity is the primary reason why so many things in Axys and APX work the way they should.  Though much has changed at the core of Axys and APX, both of these systems can potentially run a report created on The Professional Portfolio (the precursor to Axys and APX) 25 years ago.  Due to the continuity of Advent’s portfolio management systems, users of The Professional Portfolio and Axys have been able to jump into APX without a lot of training.

Last year, when I attended the Advent conference in Boston, a panelist from the Advent Users Group touched upon the issue of APX owners using APX like Axys.  Her point was that you should use the newer features of APX v3, but as she mentioned it, I couldn’t help thinking how much the earlier versions of APX were like Axys.  Aside from the SQL backend and other related platform benefits, it felt like you were still using Axys, only it was more complicated and clunky.

Even now, we see that the heart of Axys continues to beat inside APX, playing a critical role with respect to backward compatibility and legacy reporting.  Over the course of its first five years, APX has matured significantly.  That initial awkward period is behind Advent APX.

In the past 18 months, Advent has made significant strides towards fulfilling the promise of APX, introducing additional SSRS reports in APX 3.x and the ability to create dashboards in APX 4.x.  I have finally heard mention of an API.  Yes, APX is more complex than Axys, but now that more of the infrastructure has been built out, you can feel better about it.  With these improvements, APX should make sense for a larger number of investment firms.

APX is a logical upgrade for Axys clients who:

  1. Want to minimize the need to retrain staff on a new portfolio accounting system.
  2. Understand that additional features, such as SSRS reporting and dashboards, come hand in hand with incremental complexity and the costs of an enterprise solution.

Those that don’t want to take on as much overhead may find solace in moving to APX on Demand (a SAAS offering), but in doing so they will have to sacrifice some of the flexibility and functionality available to self-hosted users of APX.

 

Final Score: APX 4, Axys 0

Looking at version releases of APX and Axys over the past seven years, it is easy to understand the focus of Advent’s primary resources.  Though four minor releases of Axys have been made since APX came out, there have been no major releases.  A major release implies a major change to the software, and at this point it doesn’t appear that a major Axys release is coming from Advent.

Last year’s acquisition of Black Diamond provides Axys users with another choice under the Advent umbrella, but I haven’t seen many users go from Axys to Black Diamond. While Axys improvements have stalled out, Advent’s full-throttle APX development has many of its Axys users feeling disenfranchised.  From my own perspective, Advent appears to be losing some valuable clients through a failure to more actively communicate with their SMB client base.

If Advent wants to keep Axys clients as Advent clients, they should connect with their users and reassure them that they want to work with them. Still, Advent should also understand that for some, it may make more sense to move on.

About the Author: Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com or contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.

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The Best Time to Upgrade Your Portfolio Accounting System

Filed under: Axys, Best Practices, Portfolio Management Systems — Leave a comment
October 6, 2011

Though an increasing number of firms pride themselves on their ability to fire out reports within the first week of the quarter, it seems that most firms still produce and mail out their statements in the second or third week.  Yes, I said “mail out.”  Even firms that have invested in the ability to post their reports to a web portal still mail most of their reports out due to low adoption rates by their clients.   Investment advisors that don’t get their reports out within the first three weeks of quarter end are operating outside of the norm.

There are 13 weeks in a quarter.  Given that most firms send quarter end reports during week two, operations folks aren’t thinking about doing an upgrade in week three.  They’re busy catching up on what they didn’t do in weeks one and two, while they were managing the client reporting process.  That leaves ten possible weeks for a system upgrade.  Weeks four through six are ideal, giving your firm adequate time to test your systems and apply fixes as necessary.

Weeks seven to 13 become increasingly unappealing; lucky number 13 is the worst possible time to perform a system upgrade.  Most people in the investment business know this.  With 25 years of experience installing Advent products, I consider the time approaching quarter end an obvious no-fly zone for in-place system upgrades, no matter how competent you are.  I was stunned yesterday when I received a call from a customer related to a system upgrade.

Apparently, someone working with Advent talked them into upgrading to Axys 3.8.5 last week, telling them they wouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade.  When you are unfamiliar with a client site, broad-sweeping statements like this are all too easy to make.  After the upgrade, their billing reports didn’t work.  The representative doing the upgrade was able to fix the standard billing report, but could not fix our compound billing report, which is used to generate client invoices.

Billing Report (created via compound reporting macros and replang)

Due to this issue, our customer’s billing process was on hold this week until the issue was resolved.  We received their call yesterday afternoon, and called them back before close of business, but didn’t hear from them until today.  We promptly connected to their system, reviewed their issue and resolved it; however, this incident certainly had the potential to end in technical tragedy.

I recently blogged on the different versions of Axys 3.x we see in use working with Advent clients.  The blog indicated that Axys 3.8.5 is a solid product release and should be an easy upgrade for users, but also underscored the need for users with customizations to anticipate difficulties.

Advent typically shows good sense in planning.  For example, in Axys to APX conversions, systems are run in parallel for months.  I am disappointed to hear about this incident, which I can only hope is an oversight, not the modus operandi for Axys upgrades.

Some people feel the need to push ahead no matter how close they are to quarter end.  Perhaps they make a bit more progress in doing so. Still the question for me is what benefit this upgrade had last week versus a couple weeks from now when quarter end reports have been produced.  If there is a benefit that offsets the risk, I am all for it.  In this case, I just don’t see it – not for my client.

About the Author:
Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com or contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.

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Escalating Investment Industry Product Pricing Continues to Mystify Some Advisors

Filed under: APX, Axys, Portfolio Management Systems — Leave a comment
August 18, 2011

If you saw $500 on the ground, would you pick it up?

In late 2008, most investment firms were focused on getting lean and surviving a heretofore unprecedented economic downturn. Because we specialize in working with these firms, we wanted to use our core expertise to help create efficiencies and save them money. We ran an ad in the Advent User Group (AUG) newsletter offering two free hours of consulting. It wasn’t a completely altruistic idea; we figured we would gain some long-term clients for the effort.

The ad was run, and I honestly thought we’d get some calls. Surely there were investment firms that would want FREE consulting, right?  We typically receive calls from investment professionals across the nation inquiring about our products and services, but not one person called to inquire about the two hours of free consulting.

It is possible that users were so busy that they weren’t reading the newsletter.  Perhaps the ad, which was kind of ugly, didn’t inspire firms to call us.  In all likelihood, this ad failed to generate interest because of its target market: investment advisors and their trusted professionals.

I have worked with these folks for over twenty years and understand who they are, so perhaps I should have known better. The typical investment advisor is a conservative skeptic who believes you get what you pay for. In their view, our offer of free consulting must have appeared hollow or even insincere. Investment firms are stereotypically risk-averse regarding their back office operations. For these reasons, many investment advisors are victims of a negative feedback loop. 

Software companies are able to continually increase fees without making dramatic technology improvements because, by and large, investment advisors are resistant to change and afraid to try anything else. This inertia obstructs new firms from competing with the established firms since the market share they need to capture is engaged in agreements that investment advisors may not think entirely reasonable, but acceptable for now.

Advent Software, for example, consistently raises the cost of Axys support and focuses on compatibility and bug fixes without implementing large-scale feature additions to further merit such sustained cost increases. Advent could change this with a little effort, but historically it hasn’t been part of their agenda. Nevertheless, I still believe that Axys is the most cost-efficient and feature-rich portfolio management system available to investment advisors today.

Axys users need to remember that the name of the company is Advent Software, not Axys Software. They are a for-profit business, and that is a good thing for their customers in the long-term. From my limited knowledge and perspective, it does seem like a grossly disproportionate amount of Advent’s research and development efforts go into things that are not related to Axys. For an Axys user paying annual maintenance fees which hypothetically go to support, research and development of their product, this is problematic – especially if they rarely call Advent for support.

Advent has invested significant resources in APX, an enterprise product offering which is a possible upgrade for Axys users. In reality, APX currently doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of non-enterprise Axys users. In May, Advent finalized a deal to buy Black Diamond for $73M. Three months later, just how or whether Black Diamond will be integrated into Advent’s other product offerings remains to be seen.

Advent is not alone. Earlier this year I had a call from a prospective customer that was frustrated by Satuit’s pricing plan. After paying roughly $2K per year to use Packman to package their reports and host statements on their portal, they were told that pricing would increase 300% over the next three years. If I made that announcement, I know what would happen to my clients.

To be fair to Satuit, they gave their client a year’s notice of the increase – enough time for them to find and implement a suitable alternative. We have experience selling competing products, and we feel that Satuit’s product, originally from Lync Consulting, had been underpriced at $2K per year.  Unfortunately, their client got used to paying $2K a year and didn’t feel like they could stomach more than $6K per year, even though the cost was scheduled to increase gradually.  Regardless, my advice to this prospective client was to stick with Satuit for now, because the cost of switching from their solution to our solution would outweigh any benefit in terms of cost over three years.

Rational product pricing takes competition, expectations, value, ongoing support and profitability into account, but don’t expect to make any sense of pricing in the industry where “greed is good.” Investment advisors that really want to change the status quo should follow Gandhi’s advice: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In order to make it happen, they need to be willing to take on a certain level of risk. If the last twenty years is any indication of what we can expect, don’t hold your breath on this one.

Most investment advisors will continue to get what they pay for in the foreseeable future.

About the Author:
Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com or contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail atkshea@isitc.com.

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Technical Trials and Tribulations of Quarter End

Filed under: Axys, Best Practices, Portfolio Management Systems — Leave a comment
July 8, 2011

Yesterday, I fielded a call from one of our clients that generates reports for several thousand accounts using our reporting engine.  As part of their reporting process, they extract data from Axys and import it into a database that facilitates data quality reviews and enhanced PDF reporting via Crystal Reports.

My primary contact at the site phoned me to let me know that part of our process, which took 20 minutes last quarter, was still running after two hours.  We immediately established a remote session to review the issue.   In the past, we have experienced some issues with individual PCs processing at slower speeds due to poor network infrastructure, but more recently this firm invested in better network hardware to support their rapidly growing business.

We play a limited role for this client and focus on their quarterly reporting and billing systems.  Though we are IT experts, it is not our responsibility to oversee and manage their IT infrastructure; however, at quarter end, a processing issue where systems are operating at a fraction of their normal speed rapidly becomes our problem.

I am very familiar with the bottlenecks that can slow Axys performance.   The most critical of these is network speed.  100MB Ethernet (full-duplex) is an older standard, and we still find it in limited use at many offices.  Gigabit Ethernet (full-duplex) is the current standard that should be in use by nearly all investment firms.  Theoretically, gigabit is ten times faster, but you won’t see that in practice.  You actually get six to seven times the performance of 100MB Ethernet with gigabit Ethernet over decent cabling.

Our system is normally connected to the file server that hosts Axys via gigabit network connections.  A quick check of the system revealed that it was connected to a gigabit switch.  We reviewed a few other things to make sure that there wasn’t a performance issue specific to our system.  Everything we looked at pointed to a problem with their environment.  I was fairly certain that, somewhere between our system and the file server hosting Axys, we were not connected at gigabit speed.  We still needed to identify where the breakdown was occurring.

My technical contact at the firm first assured me that all of the systems were connected to gigabit switches, and nothing had changed since last quarter.  We discussed the wiring of the network in detail and I was eventually able to find out that they had added a new Dell switch in the server room, but assured again that it was a gigabit switch.  I asked them to double-check the switch and let me know the model.

Though most of our own experiences purchasing equipment from Dell are good, Dell isn’t perfect.  Perhaps the Dell sales rep didn’t know one gigabit switch from another.  Our client thought they had purchased a managed gigabit switch where all ports were gigabit.  They had, in fact, bought and installed a 100MB managed switch with two gigabit uplink ports.   Further discussion revealed that the gigabit uplink ports were not being used either.

For those not familiar with network nomenclature, the primary switch to which all of your other switches, routers and servers are connected is considered your network backbone.  It is a best practice to implement a backbone that has throughput greater than or equal to that of the devices connected to it. 

When two network devices auto-negotiate to communicate with each other the maximum speed is usually the highest speed commonly supported by both devices.  Other environment specific issues, such as the quality of cabling between two devices, can further degrade the speed at which two network devices communicate.

In this particular case, our client had unknowingly installed a switch that was forcing all of their servers with gigabit Ethernet to communicate with the rest of the network using 100MB Ethernet instead of gigabit.  Users that were not connected directly to the backbone had a gigabit connection though another switch, and assumed that everything was fine.

The short-term fix for this client was to connect their file server hosting Axys to one gigabit uplink switch and use the other uplink to connect to their larger gigabit switches.  They also called Dell and had them send the right switch overnight, which they installed today.

Having an up-to-date network diagram is a best practice.  If you don’t have one, have your technical staff or IT provider create and maintain a network diagram documenting your systems, so you can proactively manage problems with network performance and reliability.

About the Author:
Kevin Shea is President of InfoSystems Integrated, Inc. (ISI); ISI provides a wide variety of outsourced IT solutions to investment advisors nationwide. For details, please visit isitc.com or contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@isitc.com.

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