Northern Trust's Globally Dispersed Businesses Require 24/7 Customer Service

- New data center will help increase global capacity,- Standard IT implementation methodology should help with planning,- High-performance computing will help firms manage increasingly fast digital markets

The Northern Trust Company

Nirup Krishnamurthy

CTO, EVP

SIZE OF FIRM:
$756 billion in assets under management as of March 2007.

PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
CIO (2003-2005), UAL Corp. (1990-2005).

EDUCATION:
Ph.D. and M.S. in industrial engineering, State University of New York, Buffalo.

The Northern Trust Company
50 S. LaSalle Street
Chicago, IL 60603

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PIECE OF PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY?
My universal remote control.

WHO IS THE MOST ADMIRABLE TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE OUTSIDE OF THE FINANCIAL COMMUNITY?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- the founders of Google. Not just because of their phenomenal business success, but fundamentally, their innovative thinking.

What's Next?

The trend toward using high-performance computing is increasing as markets get smaller and more digitized. Grid computing has been around for a while now, but the financial industry is just getting its arms around how to use it. As we try to compress our processing window, we will be using some sophisticated processing to cut down our run times.

VITALS

IT Budget:

$350 million, including capital.

Key Technology Management:

Ravi Gundimeda, Director, Enterprise Architecture

Barbara O'Malley, Director, Worldwide Business Applications

Andrea Ford, Director, IT Governance

Larry Hunka, Director, Technology Risk Management

Shari Jarmy, Director, Corporate Applications

Randy Overbey, Director, Technology Operations

Kay Northfell, Director, Process Optimization

Size of Technology Team:

1,817, including IT contractors.

Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:

We use smartsourcing models to determine when it makes sense to outsource, including the use of offshore resources.

Key Technology Partners:

Metavante, IBM, Cognizant Technology Solutions, BearingPoint, The Direct Response Resource, AT&T, Hitachi Data Systems, SunGard, Microdynamics Group, BMC Software.

2008 INITIATIVES

Capacity Enhancement

Our data center will be running out of capacity some time in the 2011 time frame. We are initiating a project to build a new enterprise data center that will replace one of our existing data centers in the Chicago area.

Upgrading Underlying Platform

As we looked at Passport of the Future and we tried to understand the needs of businesses, we reached the conclusion that the current infrastructure would not support us for the long term. We will replace our full infrastructure. It's a huge migration effort that's going to take several years to accomplish.

IT Implementation Process

We need to get a lot more disciplined in the way we manage infrastructure. We've decided to implement an IT service- management concept. When an organization grows rapidly, we tend to react instead of planning. We're trying to change that. We want to get a lot more proactive in terms of people process and technology.

TOP 3 CURRENT PROJECTS

European Transfer Agencies

We are growing our fund accounting business in Europe. We have a project that involves building a pan-European platform for traditional and alternative investment funds. When we are finished, we will have implemented a consistent operating model across all of our transfer agencies in Europe.

Passport of the Future

We are overhauling our client experience. The first one we are working on is Private Passport, which is focused on the personal side. Some of the enhancements include showing clients only what matters to them, for example.

Global Expansion

As we expand our global footprint for new business, we have to service our customers 24/7. The objective is to strengthen our processing capabilities and expand our operational resources so a client in any region can experience processing in his/her time zone.