Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Derek Robinson: Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.InterSystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson, and on this episode, I'll chat with Michael Hom, Financial Solutions Executive at InterSystems, about the launch of InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management.
[00:00:34] Derek Robinson: Welcome to the Data Points Podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. I'm Derek Robinson. On this episode, I'm joined by Michael Hom to talk about the launch of InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management. Michael has years and years of experience in the financial services industry, and this service is really tailor-made for that industry. Built upon InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management provides a lot of functionality that both technical and nontechnical audiences can leverage. And it aims to be a game changer for delivering business impact within financial services. So let's hear from Michael as he shares with us everything we need to know about this service.
[00:01:18] Derek Robinson: All right, Michael Hom, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Michael, how's it going?
[00:01:23] Michael Hom: Going well. How are you?
[00:01:24] Derek Robinson: Good, thank you. And we're excited to talk about a brand-new cloud service that our users will be very interested to hear about. So before we get there, let's start by just telling our listeners a little bit about who you are and what your role is here at InterSystems.
[00:01:37] Michael Hom: Sure. I have about 25 years of experience working in investment banking. I started my career at Lehman Brothers. Some of you may have heard that, but most recently I was part of the Royal Bank of Canada.
I manage global technology teams. I've built cross-product trading systems to analytical platforms supporting flow and derivative businesses. I joined InterSystems nearly four years ago as the head of Financial Services Solutions, and my main role is to build solutions based on the IRIS data platform, to solve complex financial services business problems.
[00:02:23] Derek Robinson: Nice. And so that experience seems to dovetail quite nicely into what we're about to talk about, which is a brand-new service called InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management. Now, on this podcast, we've talked about a few different cloud services in the past. This is the newest one releasing from InterSystems. So tell us a little bit about this service.
[00:02:41] Michael Hom: Sure. At the high level, InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management is our modern, cloud-native solution that provides asset managers with a timely and comprehensive view of their data. It empowers them to make data-driven decisions along with handling their analysis and reporting requirements across their organization. The solution provides an array of self-service capabilities to facilitate analysis and insight generation with a quick and easy access to live and historical data. Additionally, the solution automates and manages the associated data-processing activities.
[00:03:26] Derek Robinson: Right. Nice. So it sounds like it really packs a lot of functionality in there. Digging a little deeper, tell us a little bit about the capabilities that exist beyond that kind of high-level view of it. What are some of the key calling-card capabilities that this Total View For Asset Management will provide?
[00:03:43] Michael Hom: Right, well, first off, TotalView is built on top of IRIS, so we leverage all the powerful features that I think many of you guys know, but we take that and then provide again a set of self-service capabilities, right? The whole emphasis on easy-to-use is one of our main goals. As for key features, first there's a set of capabilities that help you connect to a diverse set of data sources. We are able to load and transform and promote your data as appropriate. We have a set of incremental data strategies that will allow you to determine what has changed and only load those data sets. With that, we also have a set of pre-built connectors to common data sources within the asset management world. And that obviously then sets the stage where once you are connected to that data, we provide a set of control and governance functions.
First is that we have a built-in business scheduler that is aware of market holidays and regional holidays, and accounts for that within how it actually runs the jobs that you have to manage your data. We also have data cataloging capabilities, so with every single data source and all data structures within TotalView, we provide that full metadata to allow you to search through and use. Obviously with control functions, we also provide validation and reconciliation capabilities in a nice, easy-to-use UI, but also expose the full power underneath that allows you to do more complex stuff with straight-up SQL. Coming to persistence, we have full data auditability, so we have a full chain history on the data that you have. It's a historical data store that has a custom data model but is extensible by the client if they choose to do so.
On top of that, we also have slice-and-dice capabilities, so allowing people to aggregate your data and then look through it in an exploratory way. And then from a user standpoint, we do try to limit that down to your standard query methods like JDBC/ODBC or via API calls that you set up. But in addition, you can also use your data visualization tool of choice, whether it's Tableau or PowerBI. We want to make sure that the user is able to use the data, but in a safe and controlled manner. Lastly, we provide a set of sample reports: portfolio reporting, performance reporting, that customers can take and tailor to their own specific needs or requirements.
[00:06:51] Derek Robinson: Nice. So kind of putting myself in the user's shoes there, I imagine that a lot of people listening to that list of capabilities who may be familiar with technology and the financial services industry, might be having the gears turn already for their use cases, right? But for those people who may not be able to immediately identify it, what are some ways that businesses you envision will take advantage of this? How do the end users really translate this into business impact?
[00:07:18] Michael Hom: Right, so we've been working with a few customers as they are using TotalView, and what we're coming out at, and finding out, is that the automation that we provide really facilitates work done across the organization. So one side is the reporting, right? So customers now can automate a lot of their month-end reporting, financial reporting, regulatory reporting, even risk reporting. And that can be done by analysts versus kind of developers. And I think that's a key trait that we'll maybe hit upon a little bit later. But in the same vein, using the same data, you can power all your other systems and solutions like your client reporting systems. And the key part of that is you're using the same data. So there's a consistency across the board around what data you have and how it's actually calculated, and so forth. In the same vein I mentioned about data visualization tools, well, once you have your data all sorted and aggregated, well, you can put your tool, and you can explore your data. You can set it up where end users can interactively look through the data and find things that they want to find. And obviously that's a small set of users. But then from an analysis standpoint, whether perhaps you're a quant or a data scientist, you have all the data there. It's stored historically. So you can do that trend analysis that you always wanted to do. You may be looking retroactively and looking at a trade cost analysis. In the same vein, if you're not using that, you can obviously take all the data and utilize it to create and tune your models, or even train your AI/ML models. Right. So all that power and all that data is all available for all the different consumers of the data across your organization. Likewise, I think one key trait that we heard from one of our customers is, well, now that the data is all in one place, it actually satisfies the regulatory requirements of some of the new regulations because many times regulators and auditors want to look at: how did a number get generated? And now that you have that full history, that should be an easier exercise, where you can actually go in, look at a data point, and trace it all the way back. Implementing a data fabric like TotalView really provides that rich functionality that you have the single source of truth across all of it.
[00:10:01] Derek Robinson: Nice. Yeah, it sounds like it really delivers a lot of impact for people that…I hear you mention things like AI and ML models, and it just spans a lot of our technology stack, I think. So it's really exciting to see it sort of brought together in a digestible way.
Kind of shifting the focus, a lot of our listeners might be longtime users of going all the way back Caché, Ensemble and now IRIS and IRIS for Health. So framing it for them, who may not be as exposed to our new cloud services and kind of a lot of these newer solutions that we offer, what stands out to you the most as being some big value adds for that audience of people who are deeply familiar with our kind of, I'll call it the traditional product stack that InterSystems has offered.
[00:10:45] Michael Hom: Yeah, I guess the first one I'll highlight is self-service. So I think IRIS is one of the most powerful technologies I've ever seen. I've been in the industry for about 25 years, use various technologies to solve problems.
I will say IRIS is amazing. But one of the things about a powerful platform is it may not be the easiest thing to use. And so we're making it a lot easier, providing self-service capabilities and encapsulating and exposing all that power to a user, providing the automations on the more monotonous stuff, but then allowing them to do all the things that they need to do. I think that's the first one. Secondly, I think we all know that, I think, developers are scarce and valuable resources, and they're kind of key to a lot of the newer things that we have to do from a transformational standpoint or anything related to data. Right? So we now expand to different personas within an organization. So now a data engineer, a data steward, data analyst, and maybe some end users who are a little more savvy can use TotalView to get the things that they need done with data, right? So I think that is a key part. I think the last one I'll highlight is it's more about time to value, right? Again, there's a lot of work to be done, and I don't think people are sitting around doing nothing. And so the ability to get to faster insights and faster decisions by automating all the capabilities that they need so they don't have to spend time on it, I think is a huge, huge benefit for a customer. It's just getting that through so they can focus on, again, the value-add activities that they normally should be doing.
[00:13:01] Derek Robinson: Right. Nice. That's really exciting. Final question here, which is going to actually overlap a little bit, I think, with what you were just explaining, but kind of stepping back into the bigger picture at InterSystems, and I began this interview by mentioning some of our other cloud services that we've talked about, things that we've highlighted recently. It's kind of part of a larger movement into cloud technologies over the past few years. So for those who have been witnessing that, how does TotalView For Asset Management really slot into this larger cloud-native strategy? And I don't know if we call it a transformation happening at InterSystems, but a lot more things are becoming cloud-native and able to run on demand, like you said, in the cloud. How does TotalView slot into that bigger picture?
[00:13:43] Michael Hom: Well, our focus is definitely the cloud, right? I think that's very clear from our management, from Scott and others. What we want to provide is all of our capabilities as cloud-native managed solutions. I think that's what the customer base has been asking for too. So it's well aligned. We are fully focused on making that happen. TotalView is a cloud service. It's part of our InterSystems collective cloud offering. TotalView is currently targeted toward financial services, specifically asset managers. But as we continue to expand the solution with new capabilities, we will see how it pivots. But it's all going to be in the cloud. In the same vein, part of what we're looking at is: we want to be able to build new solutions faster to serve different needs, different use cases for our customers. Part of that is that TotalView should be offered within smart data services.
It is also another way of composing applications in a super fast manner to solve business problems in the easiest possible way. And so, in the same vein that we want to be able to solve these problems faster and be able to pivot, well, one of the things that we can do with TotalView already is, hey, it's a set of functionality that you heard, but what if we were able to change a set of rules, logic, and configuration, and target another sector, right? We mentioned that it's for asset management, right? But guess what? If you again change a couple of the configuration points, you can have it targeting toward retail banks. Because during our implementation phase, obviously you guys all are aware of the market, that SVB and all these other banks like First Republic had some issues. Well, what if we were able to toggle this whole set of applications into a new sector, or maybe even a new industry? Again, that's part of our whole collective strategy, the way we build software, the way we want to target different areas. I think it's very exciting. I think that we are very focused, and I think we have a bright future there.
[00:16:22] Derek Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. It sounds really exciting and positions us well to be flexible and be able to expand into those new territories like you mentioned. So, Michael Hom, thank you so much for taking the time. And we're very excited to see how everything goes with the launch of this service ,and more to come. So thanks again.
[00:16:36] Michael Hom: Thank you for having me.
[00:16:40] Derek Robinson: Thanks again to Michael for telling us all about InterSystems TotalView For Asset Management. It seems to fall at the intersection of several different well-established pieces of technology. So it's exciting to hear how this cloud service can remove barriers and unlock the potential of businesses within the financial services space. If you want to learn more about it, you can visit the product page linked alongside this podcast. That'll do it for this episode. We'll see you next time on Data Points.
