"In over 18 years at Rolfe & Nolan I cannot recall a better executed project," said Bob Freeman, Global Chief Executive. "Moving a large data centre and an office full of leading edge technology, all serving the needs of highly demanding customers is a challenge that is not undertaken lightly."

Customer Focus

The move was underpinned by Rolfe & Nolan's commitment and attention to detail. A brand new data centre was built to an exacting specification, hardware and communications were installed, customer machines were relocated, staff were moved and finally, Lowndes House was emptied, prior to handing back the keys on 24th March.

The data centre is over 2000 square feet in area, with 25% room for expansion. It has its own dedicated floor, with over one and a half miles of power cable. Nearly 25 tons of data centre systems were moved or installed as part of the move. A new Category 6 cabling system has been installed throughout R&N's four floors, complemented by a Category 6 and fibre backbone. The backbone is driven by Cisco 3700 series stack switches to provide a fully resilient network designed to support current and future needs. There are nearly three miles of data cabling over Rolfe & Nolan's four floors. Finally, a sophisticated state of the art building management system enables the data centre and office environments to be closely monitored and controlled.

Customer needs remained paramount throughout the move, allowing day-to-day customer processing to continue without any interruption. The move involved an enormous amount of co-ordination with clients, starting in August. Customer machines were relocated over a four month period November '05 – February '06.

New Business Potential

It has also been business as usual on the commercial front, where Rolfe & Nolan signed important new customers, such as Marex Financial. Work has continued unabated on Merlin, where the rollout of Fees Direct and Alerts Direct is attracting considerable market interest.

Fees Direct is a unique on-demand fee calculation, quotation and commission schedule tool, formally launched at the Boca Raton industry conference in March. Fees Direct enables users to focus on their business, rather than updating fee and commission schedules and trying to find the current commission scheme among a confusing maze of spreadsheets.

Alerts Direct gives firms better ways of managing their own and their customers' risk, using its key functions of comparing margin against collateral held, the impact of price changes on a portfolio and the monitoring of lot limits.

Rolfe & Nolan is traditionally known as a leading supplier to the back office. Products such as Alerts Direct and Fees Direct constitute a greatly enhanced offering to the middle office.