UBS Migrates to Hosted MDM Software

Once a decision was made, the project was approved by the bank's IT risk management team so that the process could be initiated in February. The phased migration project took approximately three months to complete. "At the end of May we received sign-off from internal stakeholders and went live on June 4," says Davide Frisina, global head of market data services administration for the bank

UBS's in-house deployment of MDM had been hosted on its own hardware, which required large amounts of technical support, particularly when implementing new versions of the software, Frisina says. Upgrades could take months to roll out, particularly if new hardware was required to support systems enhancements. "There is a lot of testing involved and you have to go through lengthy change management procedures," Frisina says. "First, we have to define the right IT team, and then they need to find time for our software within their respective priorities," he adds.

MDSL chief executive Ben Mendoza says most of the vendor's clients have now "evolved" towards an ASP version of its software to ease maintenance and support requirements, as bank IT teams tend to prioritize front-office trading and risk systems over administrative products such as MDM. "For us, this is all we do, so we can give it our undivided attention," he says.

UBS now benefits from software that is fully managed by MDSL, including hosting and maintenance of the server farm that runs the Citrix-based screens, managing upgrades, and user-acceptance testing and production. MDSL also offers technical and user support for the product.

"We can provide much more online assistance, as well as online and reporting tools that are harder for the customer to make available internally," Mendoza says. And should a user require personal assistance with a particular problem, Frisina says that they can simply "call the helpdesk for hands-on first- and second-level support."

The ASP version of MDM also offers the same functionality as the bank's previous version. "Anything that we used to have on our in-house hosted solution is now available on the MDSL-hosted solution," Frisina says.

Mendoza adds that the hosted version also supports all of the automated features and interfaces that are offered by an in-house deployment of the software. In UBS's case, this includes interfaces to entitlement systems such as Reuters' Direct Access Control Server, as well as human resources and reporting systems, both for internal management and reporting market data inventories in declarations to both vendor and exchange.