Allianz Global Investors Management Partners (AGI), which is made up of three separate investment management firms, has about $45 billion in assets under management. While the assets are not eye-popping when compared to a Vanguard or Fidelity, it's still a sizable company.

What's not sizable, though, is the technology team that supports AGI's business applications. In all, just 33 people manage all of the business applications for AGI's three investment management companies, San Diego-based Nicholas Applegate Capital Management (NACM), Dallas-based NFJ Investment Group and Oppenheimer Capital (OpCap) in New York. The application team oversees all of the systems that are needed to run the business, including portfolio management, compliance, sales, CRM, performance and attribution functionality, to name just a few. And the management of all of the business applications and software falls under the leadership of one person, Steve Rapp, who is the managing director and CTO for Allianz Global Investors Management Partners. (Rapp's 33-person team oversees only business applications. Another team of 70 or so people runs the technology and operations side, including all hardware, desktops, networking and telephones.)

With such a relatively small support team, most observers would assume that AGI leans heavily on outsourcers. "We don't have cadres of programmers working for us in an outsourced facility in Bangalore," Rapp says. "But we do have classic long-standing outsourcing relationships." For instance, AGI's accounting systems are run out of Toronto at an SS&C Technologies facility.

"In those cases, we are entirely outsourcing the environment and application, and we just remote [connect] in," app explains. "We have a number of relationships like that."

And AGI doesn't lean heavily on consultants either, according to Rapp. "We use consultants here and there, such as people we have worked with for a long time," he says. As for his 33 full-time team members, Rapp jokes, "These guys are pretty busy -- there are some weeks when they don't sleep."

Big Decisions

Despite the group's small size, Rapp and his senior team members -- including SVP Larry Russell and VPs Mike Urban, Sean Hudson and J.P. Gagnon -- have made some big decisions recently, as is increasingly common of the CTO role in today's business environment.

For example, last year Rapp, then just the CTO at NACM, made the big decision to relocate to New York. The change in scenery turned out to be the right decision for Rapp and for AGI. But moving 2,900 miles to another office was a relatively small decision compared with some of the other work-related decisions Rapp has made over the past couple of years, as AGI is in the process of replacing and standardizing virtually all of its major business systems simultaneously.

"If you were to name all of the major application platform systems at an investment management firm, we are changing all of them at once," Rapp relates. "We are working on the accounting, portfolio management, trade order management, FX trading, performance and attribution, and reconciliation [systems]. This is a multiyear project."

In fact the project is the reason why Rapp requested to be transferred to New York -- so he could help oversee the move to the new systems. "When you are doing a change at this level -- basically all of the major systems -- you need to focus on the people who will be involved in the project," Rapp says. That's not to say that actually configuring and rolling out the new systems is easy.

"Having smart people who are experienced with the technology certainly helps" make the transition to the new technology easier, Rapp comments. "But with so many new tools, you are moving people away from their old systems and practices. That creates a lot of anxiety, and that is one of the things that I actually thought long and hard about.

"That is why I asked if I could relocate to New York for a period of time," Rapp continues. "I felt that to have someone fly in to New York and say 'Here's some more change. My flight leaves tomorrow, see you in a month' -- that is disconcerting. It doesn't build a relationship, and it doesn't build a sense that we are trying to raise all the boats here" in terms of adding functionality and capabilities across the organization.

One Thing Led to Another...

Specifically, AGI is adding functionality by implementing a unified portfolio platform based on technology that NACM has in place in San Diego. "This all started through a collaboration between myself and the then CTO here in New York" in early 2008, Rapp says. "Originally it was going to be operations and technology. We then shared some application technology that was developed in San Diego [for NACM]."

At that time, Rapp adds, OpCap and NFJ were starting to embark on a major technology investment to upgrade many of their business systems. "They saw some of the things we already created, so they decided to co-opt them rather than pay someone else to develop them," Rapp says, adding that at that point senior management saw the benefits of having one technology organization that serves the three independent investment management companies.