AIM Software has restructured, hired senior executives and put together a product roadmap that increases investment in product development and signposts moves into both managed services and the middle office. We caught up with Gayatri Raman, the company’s recently appointed managing director and chief operating officer, to find out more about the restructure and AIM’s response to customer requirements for enterprise data management solutions.
The company’s burst of activity is a result of private equity investment from New York based Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which early last year took a majority stake in AIM and has since been pretty hands on at the company.
Raman joined AIM in New York in August 2015, moving from Capgemini, where she led sales for the consultancy’s capital markets business. Her role was to set up AIM’s US organisation. In June of this year, she moved to headquarters in Vienna, Austria as part of a restructure that made her co-managing director of the company with Josef Sommeregger, formerly global head of operations. Raman is responsible for product development, delivery, HR and finance, while Sommeregger, as chief commercial office and head of product management, takes responsibility for market facing activities including sales and product management.
Raman explains: “We are transforming to move faster and bring innovative products to our clients more quickly. The restructure changed AIM’s focus from delivering toolkits with bespoke solutions to a more forward thinking product company providing business applications, investing more in product development and looking at technologies that can be leveraged to improve functionality.”
Leading the product development drive across the company’s Gain platform is Deepak Srinivasan, who was named as chief technology officer last month and also joined the company from Capgemini, where he was global head of solutions and delivery in the capital markets business. Another recent addition is Matt McLoughlin, who joined AIM from Calypso and reports to Raman as head of professional services in EMEA.
Raman says: “The professional services team will focus on clients and how our products work for them. It includes specialists from the buy side and meets with the product development team every two months to talk about the roadmap.”
With investment money available from Welsh Carson, AIM plans to work with clients to expand its offer by adding new business apps and functionality to the Gain platform. It is also considering whether to acquire to expand, but will look first to partnerships to extended its reach.
Raman says: “We are strong in data management and master data management, and our sweet spot is business apps that can be tailored for our clients. We don’t host apps at the moment, but clients want more than that and are talking about AIM running operations for them, which is why managed services and perhaps a partner are of interest to us.” In the middle office, AIM sees a gap in how real-time series data comes in and is managed. Raman comments: “We have a proof of concept on this and are talking to prospects about it.”
Taking AIM to the next stage will also involve building up the company’s hubs in Vienna, New York and London. The company is hiring to expand product development in New York and professional services in London and expects to have about 130 employees by the end of the year, a net gain of 30%.
It is expecting a similar percentage gain in growth over the year, having closed deals with a number of tier one asset managers and asset servicers across EMEA and the US, and is looking to grow faster based on product progress and stronger teams in the US and UK. From a competitive perspective, AIM meets Markit EDM, GoldenSource, Asset Control, Neoxam (formerly SmartCo) and sometimes Bloomberg Polarlake in the market, but says its opportunity is in providing business apps rather than large systems that work well but are expensive and time consuming to change.
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