It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

~Charles Darwin~

A recent review of Wall Street’s most profitable and prestigious firms revealed a dedication to flexibility, often demonstrated by selective outsourcing of messaging and BI (business intelligence) data services. Instead of trying to maintain expertise in the data needs of all clients, these companies typically outsource services such as data transformation, mobile data security, low-end services such as message confirmation (e-mail, fax, ftp), and the exchange of information with third-party providers.

In this review, successful outsourcing occurred in the following business scenarios:

1. Investment services companies with large institutional investors requiring custom BI reports and diverse delivery options.

2. Global organizations that need to pass information among their local data centers.

3. Financial services companies coordinating transactions between suppliers and customers with varying levels of technological sophistication.

4. Investment banks requiring the rapid assimilation of new data feeds for analysis.

5. Ratings bureaus that receive performance reports from numerous corporations.

6. Portfolio management offices with clients in different time zones that send transmissions during off hours.

All of these outsourcing operations are responses to the same problem: the increasing need for speed, accuracy and efficiency in addressing new requirements for the transformation and transmission of data. Businesses need to be able to send information to anyone, anywhere, in any format, by any means. Consider:

• Globalization requires interaction with new partners in new regions, each with its own data architecture, legal compliance standards and security needs.

• Companies themselves are increasingly distributed and need to coordinate and support offices that transfer large amounts of data around the clock.

It is no surprise, then, that outsourcing data management and transmission functions is a popular solution for the most successful financial institutions. By allowing a specialized company to handle the flow of information into and out of their data centers, these organizations gain several competitive advantages:

• Increased Speed & Flexibility: The ability to accept data feeds in any format means new sources of information can be tapped and consolidated.

• Increased Accuracy: Data management shops have proprietary tools that make error-handling easy.

• Increased Visibility: Marketing data can be fed into any format and distributed in more ways.

• Increased Computing Resources: Internal processing power can be devoted to core business computing and internal databases can be transferred to a robust, globally available hosted solution.

• Around-the-Clock Availability of Trained Technical Personnel: Deal with data providers and customers in any time zone.

• Greater Facility for Service Assessment: Vendors of specialized services have a vested interest in providing metrics on their systems’ performance.

A data center today must continually examine where it is flexible. If it cannot make rapid changes in certain areas, it should consider outsourcing those functions to an experienced vendor that can. Wall Street’s most profitable firms tend to outsource messaging and BI data services, which allows them to invest more of their resources in core value-adding activities and tap the capabilities of firms better equipped to respond to changes in data processing demands. For many of the top firms, it is not a question of if, but to whom to outsource these functions.

Josh Wurzburger is President of CRC, Inc.

For more information about outsourcing data management, BI and messaging services call

888-888-5674, email: solutions@crc.net or

visit www.crc.net.