Small Commitments, Big Impact! An Intro To Adhoc Support Services at Data Intellect

Simon Frazer

At Data Intellect, we offer a variety of services and we are probably most well-known for our kdb+ expertise. Traditionally, we have helped clients with pieces of advisory work, system reviews, ‘build’ projects and consulting resources to assist with their day-to-day development and support needs.

However, over the last year or two, we have helped a number of clients with a new offering – something offering more flexibility to their needs.

This blog outlines our ad-hoc support service business and how and where it may be useful to your business.

What Is IT?

The overall aim is to provide a level of service, delivery and expertise, that may be required on a more ad-hoc basis. In some cases, it may not make sense to have a dedicated person/team, or train existing staff, to provide the capabilities required.

For instance, you need support of a kdb+ application, or you need occasional development work done. So how does our ad-hoc support service business help in this case?

Well, think of it as a mini-managed service. We provide a team of experts, managed by a dedicated service lead, who are ready to act as and when required. Typically the agreement might entitle you to, let’s say, up to 4 days of work per month (all flexible, tailored to each case and requirements). If this is primarily to provide support coverage, then the team will respond and act once the issue has been received, and do what a support team does. That is, bring things back to a good state, provide issue post-mortem, and define actions to prevent the issue from re-occurring. Alternatively, the engagement might be to provide development work, where the 4 days can be spent picking up the work from a prioritised backlog. Or, it might be a bit of both, where the remaining time not used on support requests is filled with development work to enhance the system.

Note that this service can be applied to any kdb+ system, built with TorQ or otherwise, and can also be extended across the KX Product suite, including KX Surveillance, KX Sensors, KX Platform & Delta.

Who's It Suitable For?

It might be better to start with who it isn’t suitable for. If you have a large or critical application where active support and monitoring throughout business hours is required, then this isn’t for you. It’s not going to have tightly defined SLAs (see our managed services instead). If your application is on the critical path for the business and requires lots of development, again, this probably isn’t for you.

If you have a smaller and/or stable install but lack the build and support capacity or expertise, then this is perfect for you. We can take that stress or workload away and apply the vast expertise we have within Data Intellect.

We aim to provide flexibility in the service, meaning we operate rolling periods for contract usage. For example, notice how a ‘4 days/month’ contract might be applied, providing flexibility in changing support and development circumstances. Our enforcement of this operates on a days used over a rolling period, such as 3 months, allowing you to save days, or use ahead of time as needed.

Given it is a mini-managed service, Data Intellect can offer a variety of available skills, resources and expertise within the company to help with this service, as required. Therefore it is important to consider the onboarding procedures of your business. If onboarding new people to the team is a lengthy and complex process, then this could prove a challenge to the service.

Value Add Examples?

So given the brief description, let’s look at some recent examples of where this type of service has benefitted a couple of clients.

Case Study 1

Why Were We Brought In To Help?

A large Swiss bank contracted Data Intellect to provide ad-hoc support for a small application and an architectural analysis of the current system.

The existing team consisted of team leads & developers that supported various applications and systems within the bank, and only one of the team was a kdb+ developer. As a result, the system’s development, support, and maintenance was relatively neglected. With the introduction of an ad-hoc support service team, Data Intellect could provide the capacity and expertise to help.

The client had the following high-level expectations of the team:

Create a strong kdb+ ecosystem with monitoring, system enhancements and data management/scalability.
Support any production issues from the kdb+ system.
Develop and implement kdb+ additions/changes/customisations as required to meet business requirements.

What Could We Provide?

The application ran using Data Intellects TorQ kdb+ framework. There was a small historical dataset that was refreshed monthly, sometimes quarterly. Given the infrequency of the dataset refresh, and its relatively stable nature, this wasn’t an application that needed 24/7 support. Additionally, the client had plans to increase the user base of the application and expand the data volumes. Our kdb+ expertise and TorQ knowledge meant that we could provide support and development on an ad-hoc basis to manage the application, up to 4 days per month, as well as advise on architecture and improvements to help them realise their visions for the application.

Value So Far?

After an initial discovery phase, and discussions with the existing team around previous issues and common pain points, we put together a report of our findings and recommendations for the application. The team presented a plan for improvements, each with estimated development times, which allowed the client to prioritise the work. This included things like:

enhancements to the gateway
improvements to on-disk data structure
automation of manual tasks
implementing monitoring processes
setting up appropriate development and testing environments

The DI team was then able to begin working on this list and add value for the client and application, within the confines of the time available, whilst supporting the current application state.

So far, alongside building knowledge of the application within the client team, we have been able to deliver improvements to query response times through gateway enhancements and customised logic for business requirements, whilst continuing to resolve any support issues that arise.

Case Study 2

Why Were We Brought In To Help?

In a much more recent example, an Australian FX broker came to us for support with an existing KX Trade Surveillance system. It was running well, had been developed to suit their needs by consultants previously, and required a small amount of support. The capacity to provide that support in-house was no longer there, and they also had no means to change or add to any of the surveillance, and so required the ability to make infrequent, ad-hoc business requirement changes. This included already known tasks such as onboarding and ingestion of new real-time datasets, to be used as part of the surveillance.

What Could We Provide?

Through Data Intellects partnership with KX, we had built up experience with the KX Trade Surveillance product. Additionally, having built and supported various kdb+ surveillance systems, we had expertise in the area. We also had experience with the real-time datasets in scope, and the ability to ingest these into kdb+. An agreement for up to 4 days per month of support and development was made.

Value So Far?

After an initial discovery phase to understand the KX Trade Surveillance setup and customisations, we began using the contracted time to build adaptors to the real-time data source and ingesting this to kdb+. We continue down a path of building this adaptor and using this data within kdb+ to perform best execution monitoring, reporting and visualisation of trades.