Formed through an alliance between Accenture and Microsoft seven years ago, the global technology integrator now has more than 2,500 clients in more than 30 countries. Its early success can be attributed to a methodology called Avanade Connected Architecture, or ACA.NET, a set of common tools and services that clients can draw from as they build on or integrate Microsoft technologies. Now Avanade has introduced a new tool that can serve financial advisors by tapping into a financial services institution’s underutilized computing power. Its suite is called Portfolio Studio and using Avanade’s Grid Architecture as a foundation, facilitates financial advisors’ ability to perform comprehensive quantitative analyses.

We speak with George Lipsker, Avanade’s market development director for financial services in North America, and ask him to walk us through Avanade’s key offerings for the financial services market.


Describe the evolution of Avanade’s architectural assets, tools, and methodologies?

As a joint venture of Accenture and Microsoft, Avanade’s charter is to provide the best tools and skills for developing, deploying, and managing business critical applications in the enterprise. Our approach is to create assets that take the best from our engineering organization’s development efforts as well as our client engagements. Some of our assets have been incorporated into Microsoft Enterprise Library and established by Microsoft as .NET standards for open distribution.

We have also developed assets that leverage Microsoft’s business intelligence suite to provide analytics capabilities for application development and dashboard implementation. For most large companies, collecting data from back-end systems is not a problem. Rather, the challenge lies in cost-effectively integrating, analyzing, and presenting the data in order to gain competitive advantage, protect market position, and easily pursue new business opportunities. Our collaborative efforts with Accenture and Microsoft in this space were announced at Microsoft’s Business Intelligence conference in May. As part of this announcement, Avanade will commit to a deeper investment in Microsoft’s Business Intelligence offering.

Another area of investment for Avanade has been in the Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Marketing space. We have developed assets for federated deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which has allowed us to implement larger, multi-language implementations for financial services clients. This has helped us become the leading enterprise integrator for Dynamics CRM.

It has been a busy time for Microsoft. Which technologies does Avanade consider particularly relevant to the financial services industry?

Yes, it has. Microsoft has released an amazing array of new products and enhancements this year. Many of them will have relevance in financial services, and Avanade’s offerings have been developed to take advantage of these core capabilities.

The continuing evolution and growth of SQL Server and the enhancements to the BI stack including Performance Point are particularly important to our work in the financial services sector. We continue to help clients manage their business information more effectively and gain better visibility into their critical business areas.

Excel services and some key ISV offerings will help financial services providers effectively manage the business critical functions that today operate on user desktops while continuing to provide the ease-of-use that end-users require.

The current Dynamics CRM business application has been critical in Avanade’s success in deployments for financial services clients. The economics and the intuitive use of Microsoft Outlook as a view into the data have resonated particularly well with clients considering enhancements for their financial advisor tools.

The latest release of SharePoint Server also provides a key foundation for collaboration within financial services firms as well as with their clients. With Microsoft’s enhancements in Virtualization, Automation, and Provisioning, Avanade is able to implement dynamic infrastructures for its financial services clients that help manage costs and streamline deployment.

Specifically, what solutions has Avanade created to leverage these technologies for the financial services market?

In addition to the federated architecture I mentioned, we have also developed assets to facilitate the implementation of Dynamics CRM for some common financial services use cases. Avanade also works with some key ISV’s in this space to enrich the functionality we can implement for our clients. We have also combined our skills and assets in BI and SharePoint Server to complement the Dynamics CRM tools.

We have worked with Microsoft and Accenture to leverage these technologies in the wealth management space to bring innovation to the tools financial advisors can use to better serve their clients. The ease of integration of the tools financial advisors commonly use with SharePoint Server and the BI suite enable us to provide solutions that enhance their productivity, alert them for key actions, and help them share information with their clients.

We have also worked with Microsoft and Accenture to develop a suite of assets that leverage the virtualization and provisioning capabilities of the Microsoft stack and enable us to implement dynamic infrastructures with variable cost structures for our clients.

Avanade has been leading an exciting project in Italy with high-performance computing. Tell us a little about it.

We have worked with a major bank in Italy enabling their financial professionals to design and execute comprehensive quantitative analyses with ease and speed. The resulting suite is called Portfolio Studio. It uses Avanade’s Grid Architecture as a foundation and provides a workbench that facilitates this complex and performance intensive work at design time and run time.

It is designed for ease of integration with technologies already in use at these institutions. Traditional techniques such as historical series and Monte Carlo simulations are performance intensive. Many major financial services firms have large arrays of servers designed to handle peak volumes. Much of this computing power is underutilized at other times and could be harvested using a grid computing infrastructure.

Portfolio Studio has components that facilitate the process for Value at Risk and other calculations including an instrument modeler, risk factor modeler, simulation modeler, and pricing module. The reporting module provides enhanced reporting capabilities for the resulting analyses.

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