Tribeca provides robust cloud and colocation services with Custodian

Author: Beatrice

Tribeca was initially created with a vision to provide bespoke services to clients across the financial services sector, from private equity to hedge funds, which depend on high levels of security and reliability. Working as an extension to clients’ internal teams driving growth and development, Tribeca has grown into a global entity with over 70 staff and a turnover of in excess of £6 million.

Since 2006, the firm has grown steadily at around 30% per year as a result of its excellent record in client retention, combined with its new client acquisition rate. This client growth quickly accelerated, resulting in Tribeca reaching out to partners for secure infrastructure and connectivity support, providing its customers with a reliable solution globally.

Customer service is a vital USP for Tribeca, priding itself on a six-second response time on the phone when customers call with any problem. With any partnership, Tribeca needed to ensure the same customer service focused ethos to enhance its already strong reputation.

Challenges for the financial industry

As the financial and investment sectors evolved, it was clear that Tribeca had to do the same to keep up with the market demand. However, within this highly specialised sector, specific challenges became clear and providing its clients with resilient and ultra-low latency connectivity would be vital for Tribeca in order to keep up with the fast-paced demands of the financial industry.

Alternative investment businesses such as private equity and hedge funds are demanding environments to work within, especially if they are live trading in various markets. For everyone working within these sectors, any IT systems downtime or loss of visibility of markets could be catastrophic, resulting in significant negative effects on financial performance.

For Tribeca’s hedge fund clients working in live markets and potentially making up to 200 trades a day, assured uptime is an incredibly important service when it comes to ‘make or break’ important deals. It’s essential that customers can navigate and action deals quickly, conveniently and reliably.

On the other hand, the connectivity requirements of private equity operators are less focused on the high-speed day-to-day volume transaction needs of hedge fund managers. However, security and resiliency remain vital necessities.

Security is also a core focus for Tribeca, given the regulated nature of the financial industry and the sensitive end-customer information being held. Tribeca needed to be able to provide a guarantee to customers that its client’s data was not only being held in a secure digital environment but it was also in a physically secure space.

With Tribeca growing in size, the services it could offer its clients also needed to expand. A private cloud environment with the option to provide hosting packages to its clients needed to be created to stay ahead of customer demand and provide a scalable solution for the expanding technology market.

With specific customers wanting more private options not hosted in the public cloud, a solution was needed to bridge this gap of services. Tribeca would need a partner to provide privately hosted infrastructure with the assurance of robust and effective data security.

Further, with plans to build its own hosting platform and add resiliency to Tribeca’s own IT infrastructure, Tribeca needed a partner which could provide these additional facilities located in close proximity to its Kent HQ.

Resilient connectivity and strong security

Tribeca’s plan for growth lead it to Custodian Data Centres, which was able to provide not only resilient connectivity but also a physically and digitally secure environment. By partnering with Custodian, Tribeca can offer customers 24/7 security, support and monitoring, plus the reassurance of ISO 27001 certification at the Maidstone facility.

Custodian’s reputation for 99.9% uptime and unwavering customer service made the perfect partnership for Tribeca and its customers. With ultra-low latency at the top of Tribeca’s agenda to adhere to its customer’s requirements, Custodian’s own resilient dark fibre network, which connects its Maidstone facility to the major communication points of presence across London and the South East, was a key asset Tribeca could not afford to miss.

“Ultra-low latency is vital for the success of our customers – if any trades are missed or connectivity is unstable it would mean fundamental losses for our customers,” says Ian Rimmer, Operations Director, Tribeca. “Custodian’s outstanding uptime record and support services have been a key foundation of Tribeca’s growth over the years”.

“Working in an unpredictable and fast-paced industry such as the financial sector, we need to work in partnership with businesses that echo our own customer-focused ethos. Custodian provides a responsive and reliable service which supports our customers and allows us to retain our existing customer relationships.”

Advantages and growth

The partnership with Custodian has created significant advantages for Tribeca, including the option of providing its customers with a secure and private hosted environment to manage their data.

Since the beginning of its relationship with Custodian, Tribeca’s rack space requirements have grown by 2300% and today the firm occupies a total of 10 dedicated racks. The initial migration into Custodian went smoothly without any downtime or faults occurring.

As a mark of confidence in Custodian, Tribeca has also introduced several of its own clients to the facility. At its peak, there were over 10 racks of equipment within the Maidstone Data Centre that were either contracted directly to Tribeca or to its clients. Indeed, when one of Tribeca’s customers also colocated at the Maidstone data centre, wanted to quickly expand its infrastructure, Custodian acted on the request with expediency to install and activate the client’s request.

On top of its physical presence, Tribeca has now added many point-to-point connectivity services both from around the UK and internationally, each of which has been implemented by the team at Custodian. All equipment and service migrations have been carried out successfully and without any issues, due to the professionalism and expertise of the Custodian team.

The bespoke and personal touch from the Custodian service team continues to impress Tribeca, as the Custodian team exceeds expectations to cater to Tribeca and its customers’ needs. It’s integral that any professional partnership replicates Tribeca’s coveted customer service approach, which they have found with Custodian. The ‘above and beyond’ approach from Custodian has been part of the reason the partnership between Tribeca and Custodian has lasted all these years.

During the time working with Custodian, Tribeca has been able to deliver excellent hosting facilities for its clients, both within its own environment and by providing colocation space to them directly. The uptime for connectivity and environmental services has been exemptional with no downtime or delays.

“The delivery of the technology is always excellent, however what sets Custodian apart is the human factor. The team are always willing to go the extra mile to deliver a successful outcome to the client, which has been the difference between them and other providers that we’ve used in the past,” says Ian Rimmer. “Even when starting with a quarter rack, we’ve never been treated as a small client but always an important partner.”

“Over the last 15 years, Custodian has provided us with outstanding support and the infrastructure to take our business to the next level globally. We look forward to expanding and growing our existing relationship with Custodian and are extremely excited for the new Dartford site to open so we can further explore the possibilities that present for us with Custodian,” concludes Ian.