Dodge & Cox

Competency: Commercial Services

Customer Profile:

Dodge & Cox Funds is one of the leading investment management firms in the world and provides services to individuals, corporations, and retirement funds.

Customer Challenge/Need:

Initially, Dodge & Cox needed a common data feed framework to handle all inbound, outbound and internal data feeds. Once completed Dodge & Cox expanded the Evolver role to include Infrastructure Architecture/Administration, Database Administration, Application Development, and Data Security.

Evolver Solution:

Consolidating data into a single physical store has proven to be the most effective approach to provide fast, highly available and integrated access to relevant information. ETL processes - extraction, transformation, and loading - are used to migrate heterogeneous data from one or more data sources into a target system to form data repositories, data marts and/or data warehouses. The Evolver team was instrumental in the following competency areas:

• Data Feed Framework - including monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting on over 150 feeds with strict service level agreements because of business requirements. The data feeds originate from multiple systems provided via HTTP, web services, FTP, and secure FTP. The data is both structured and unstructured ranging in formats such as delimited, XML, Excel workbooks, and data streams. Service level agreements for data feeds require problem resolution within 30 minutes to 1 day. Evolver has established a series of Daily and weekly reports summarizing data feed executions and issues are available online via Microsoft Report Server to both technical and business staff.
  
  
• Infrastructure Administration support in Windows environment providing system monitoring, system maintenance, system performance, system security, and storage administration. Monitoring of systems is done via Argent Monitor following Dodge and Cox escalation procedures. Evolver serves as on site expert for Microsoft Exchange and performed migration of prior releases of Exchange and Outlook. Evolver developed and documented processes for system configuration management. Our team reviews current Active Directory domain configuration and current network infrastructure. They recommend and implement changes to meet industry standard best practices and exceed customer requirements.
  
  
• Database Administration providing full lifecycle of database administration with focus on overall database architecture, security, maintenance, development and performance tuning. The Evolver team supports custom developed, legacy and third party application databases to ensure optimal performance. Evolver conducts analysis of database issues and coordinates resolutions with the development staff and external application vendors.
  
  
• Application Development Support for full system lifecycle development of software systems including SharePoint and third party order management systems. Tools used for software development include: .NET, Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft SQL Server, XML, Microsoft Reporting Server, Argent Scheduler, and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. Evolver uses Dodge and Cox’s Configuration Management to maintain all software version control in Visual SourceSafe.
  
  
• Data Security Evolver ensures the security of the data with the implementation of security audits through vulnerability assessment, review system logs, review as-is configuration of networked systems, review access control, assess physical security, and document/report findings. Evolver recommended processes and solutions for security best practices such as layered defense, incident reporting and response, patch management, Active Directory security, server hardening, endpoint security technology and workstation security. Our team recommended and implemented security technology such as endpoint encryption, data leak prevention, network edge security and vulnerability assessment tools.

Using the new process, forms definition was reduced 67% to 2 days, and the ability to define similar forms in different languages was reduced to a few hours. A wizard like interface written in C sharp (C#) was added to allow “non-developers” to define forms, thereby allowing entry level personnel to be hired to perform this task. Higher productivity, lower costs, better quality - now that’s progress, that’s Evolver.

For more information on our complete offering of commercial IT solutions call Evolver, Inc. at 703.742.4090.