Cerberus CIO Richard Alexander's A-Team

The Data Deluge
Alexander has carried that winning streak to Cerberus. The firm’s structure is different from that of many other financial services organizations: it has a hedge fund operation made up of distressed securities and assets; a private equity operation, which has garnered the greatest number of headlines; a pair of commercial lending affiliates in Cerberus Business Finance and Ableco Finance; and a real estate business, Cerberus Real Estate Capital Management. As CIO, this means Alexander’s day can involve meetings ranging from European Non-Performing Loans, to ones discussing fixed income and International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) issues. Such complexity means that a flood of data is created and acted upon across the organization, which led to Cerberus’ largest IT undertaking: building a proprietary data warehouse.

The firm’s traders need data for their models and algorithms, while the private equity, lending and real estate businesses need it to support their due diligence and decisions. Alexander realized soon after he arrived at the firm over four years ago that it needed a data warehouse—a repository to pull in all that data, and it had to be “self-service” so that staff members could easily access the information they needed.

“I really believe that it’s the IT function that can aggregate data on a timely and accurate basis and provide it in a self-serve manner to their business lines that creates a competitive advantage,” Alexander says. He says the data deluge that the industry is experiencing has marked the greatest change in his job and how the firm uses IT. Rather than using third-party solutions—which Alexander says he is comfortable with—Cerberus completely rebuilt its data warehouse on its own.

Its state-of-the-art datacenter was built earlier this year when the firm moved from its Park Avenue offices to a new space on Third Avenue. The servers reside in what used to be a legal library, complete with a raised floor and a cutting-edge, energy-efficient cooling system.

From an engineering and infrastructure perspective, these were major changes.

“The biggest pocket of IT resources is around data warehousing right now,” he says. “From a resourcing perspective, that has changed—from applications to data management. We’ve staffed up the database administrators to ensure the cubes and universes are aggregating important data and not collecting redundant data, and that there is referential integrity there. We have a whole reporting team around Business Objects to ensure that end-users can write and get the reports they need. We also have a team managing the metadata and fact data.”

To the Cloud
Connecting that data warehouse and datacenter is a private cloud. Alexander says that he’s a “huge proponent” of private clouds and that the firm has long since migrated away from physical servers to the cloud. To build it, Cerberus’ engineers worked closely with a number of vendors. “The cloud has instantly improved our scalability and flexibility,” Alexander says. “Outages virtually disappeared and we replicate every five minutes to our disaster recovery site.”

To manage the firm’s data requirements, the cloud has proven to be an invaluable tool as well, Alexander adds. “If I didn’t have this cloud where I could say, ‘Go and give them “x” number of terabytes,’ I’d be sitting there saying, ‘Order a server, mount it, rack it, configure it, and so on.’ Unequivocally, it is about speed to market and the cloud gave us that.”