“Centerprise was amazingly intuitive and seemed familiar. With assistance from excellent Astera support, we were able to develop fairly complex dataflows within hours.”
Bola Olusanya
Managing Director of Investment Risk Management
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University required a system for accurate and timely reporting of endowment investments. A key part of the solution was gathering and mapping data from a variety of sources, including outside money managers.
The Office of Investments evaluated at the leading data integration platforms currently available, and selected Centerprise for its superior usability, functionality, and affordability.
Vanderbilt University Office of Investments manages the University’s $3.2 Billion endowment. The office typically invests these funds through multiple external money managers that have little to no communication amongst one another. While normally this was not previously an issue, the economic recession in 2008 made it necessary to determine consolidated risk exposures of the endowment to better understand the impact of different macroeconomic and market shocks. This turned to be a very difficult and at times manual task because the investment data was scattered across multiple systems.
The Risk Management team decided that an application that could give accurate reports of the endowment’s factor risk exposures needed to be created. They wanted a web-based application would have an easy-to-use front end for its business users, as well as a sophisticated analytical engine to deliver the analytics necessary the university’s stakeholders.
Integrating data from multiple sources in a timely and repeatable manner turned out to be a rather complex undertaking. After a build-or-buy analysis, decision was made to acquire a data integration platform and a team was formed to evaluate various integration tools.
Key criteria for the integration platforms were ease of use for business users, extensibility, and affordability. Vanderbilt conducted detailed evaluation of several data integration platforms. SSIS, already deployed at Vanderbilt, seemed at first to be the obvious choice.
However, it was difficult to learn and use and therefore entailed a significantly high total cost of ownership. Other platforms either did not meet the evaluation criteria or were too expensive.
Following a detailed evaluation, Vanderbilt selected Centerprise Data Integrator from Astera.
According to Bola Olusanya, Managing Director of Investment Risk Management, “Centerprise met all our criteria for high developer productivity, excellent performance, workflow design, and process automation.”
“My team sat through multiple SSIS seminars and spent many hours with other competing tools and the learning curve was rather steep,” says Bola. “Centerprise, on the other hand, was amazingly intuitive and seemed familiar. With assistance from the excellent Astera support team, we were able to develop fairly complex dataflows within hours.”
By leveraging Centerprise’s dataflow, workflow, and scheduling capabilities, Vanderbilt was able to quickly develop integration jobs to automatically retrieve and map data from money managers and internal systems into the endowment tracking software. Additionally, Vanderbilt is continuing to deploy Centerprise in other areas to enhance existing processes.
Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt is a private research university enrolling approximately 12,000 students from all 50 US states and over 90 foreign countries. In its 2011 ranking of universities, U.S. News & World Report placed Vanderbilt 17th among national universities.
Based in Encino, California, Astera Software is a leading provider of data integration solutions. Astera is focused on eliminating complexities in integration processes through continuous innovation.
Astera’s flexible and extendable Centerprise platform is fast becoming the platform of choice for medium and large enterprises and government agencies. An innovative parallel processing architecture and smart optimizations enable Centerprise to meet the needs of large enterprise scale data integration projects.