For the past few years of his almost six-year tenure as chief technology officer with ASX-listed global tech firm, Iress, Andrew Todd has led a strategy to transition to being a globally consistent, collaboration-focused and remote-first workplace by 2025.

The importance of the task ahead has been further reinforced as the company migrates to a fully platform-based architecture and operating model with a view to increasing speed, scale, efficiency and ease for both clients and users.

Todd tells CIO Australia that ensuring all Iress people are equipped to make decisions and execute changes is a key requirement of realising his and the team’s vision of “operational excellence”.

This is being facilitated in two key ways:

1.     Implementing a unique, centralised cloud platform solution (Workspace One) that enables Iress’ people to do their best work.

2.     Driving Iress’ services to the Iress Cloud Platform (ICP) to improve internal efficiencies and unlock new benefits for customers.

Emerging from a partnership formed with Dell Technologies and VMware in 2021, Workspace One is a cloud-native platform that has replaced Iress’ former on-premise workplace solution.

A key benefit is that it allows for Iress staff to be onboarded much faster, no matter where they are.

“For example, with drop ship provisioning and zero touch provisioning, new computing devices are now able to be shipped direct to Iress people, no matter where they are located, and their devices can be automatically configured and quickly deployed, eliminating most of the manual labour usually involved with adding them to the network,” he explains.

Other important benefits of Workspace One include:    

-        Reduction of three hours per provisioning of new device.

-        90% less time restoring or re-deploying computing devices, which can now be done remotely through the platform.

-        70% less time reporting and pushing out Windows updates and security patches to Windows devices.

-        Elimination of any manual intervention in maintaining and supporting servers in the data centre, managing and maintaining updates on drivers and firmware, and BIOS upgrades on Windows devices.

It’s also enabled Todd and his team to achieve higher levels of information security by providing greater visibility over computing devices, allowing better management, compliance and remediation. True ‘zero trust’ has been implemented, Todd assures CIO, “which means Iress’ security is significantly improved by eliminating implicit trust and continuously validating every stage of each digital interaction”. 

The other key component in Iress’ 2025 strategy is the migration of services to the Iress Cloud Platform (ICP).

“The ICP fundamentally changes our approach to product delivery for clients across different regions, enabling our people to better collaborate and engage around client-based outcomes,” Todd explains. “The ICP also drives significant scale for the organisation by reducing the time to deliver services to customers”. 

What previously might have taken multiple regional teams weeks to execute in one product line can now be performed in minutes with the click of a button.

As many as 95% of Iress’ services have now been successfully migrated to the ICP, including Xplan, CommPay, IPS, Docstore, and 100% of UK trading, Todd says.

This has led to an over 70% improvement in upgrade times for enterprise-level clients and reduced client costs, as well as faster releases of new features and fixes enabling almost real-time value delivery.

Todd and his team have helped Iress to become a more resilient organisation, characterised by “enhanced support capabilities that enable the remediation of any issues before they impact clients, including an 80% reduction in the likelihood of severity 1 disruptions.

David Binning