Clarkston Capital Replaced SolarWinds Serv-U to Run a Nine-Platform File Exchange With One IT Person

Clarkston Capital Partners is an employee-owned, SEC-registered investment adviser with roughly $6 billion in regulatory assets under management. The Michigan firm runs one philosophy, which it calls Quality Value, across everything it manages: concentrated positions in quality companies bought at a discount, with a specialty in small companies operating in micro-niche markets. Its clients range from retirement plans, foundations, and endowments to private wealth clients and its own family of mutual funds.

An adviser manages the money, but nearly everything else about running the money lives at outside institutions. A custodian holds the assets. Administrators produce the statements. A compliance platform monitors the trades. Portfolio accounting runs on a hosted vendor system. Every one of those relationships is carried by files: account-creation files, trade files, holdings files, quarterly statements. And many of those files carry a clock. Holdings must reach the custodian the first day after month end, and the firm owes its clients trades placed at specific times.

Clarkston Capital also runs its technology deliberately lean. The firm employs about 40 people, and exactly one of them, Head of IT AJ Gould, is the technical function. With Files.com, that one-person function went on to operate production integrations across nine platforms.

Serv-U Moved the Files, and a Person Did Everything Else

For years, the exchange with those institutions ran through a SolarWinds Serv-U SFTP server the firm hosted itself. Serv-U moved files, and that was all it did. Every step around a transfer belonged to a person: creating the files, running rename scripts to match a counterparty's naming rules, initiating jobs by hand, uploading to partners ad hoc, and reaching the source data through a Citrix session into file explorer.

The cost landed on work that could not slip. A file that had to go out on a fixed day went out because one person ran every step in order, on that day. On top of the daily handling, the server itself was infrastructure to host and patch.

The arrangement held while the firm exchanged data with four external counterparties. It stopped holding as the firm grew. Each new client brought new counterparty connections, and each counterparty came with its own endpoint, its own formats, and its own naming requirements, so every addition added a proportional bundle of scripts and manual steps to one person's workload. Clarkston Capital had outgrown a transfer server. The problem was never moving the bytes; it was everything each counterparty required around the movement, multiplied by a growing roster.

Fixing it was constrained on both ends. The counterparties are external financial institutions whose SFTP servers, formats, and naming rules are theirs to set, so the transfer layer has to rename, reformat, and archive per partner. Meanwhile the source-of-record data still lived on servers inside the firm's own network. Any replacement had to bridge the two, and the entire build had to be carried by a single person with no room for a heavy migration project.

A Hosted Layer Between the Firm's Servers and Its Counterparties' Endpoints

The replacement had a clear specification. It had to sit between Clarkston Capital's on-premises systems and each partner's SFTP endpoint, handle the per-partner renaming and archiving, run on schedule and on trigger, fit the Office 365 estate the firm already ran, and require no hosting at all. Clarkston Capital selected Files.com to be that layer: a SaaS platform with no environment for the firm to maintain, built to integrate with counterparties.

Files.com became the middle layer, and each side of it solved one half of the constraint.

Files.com On-Prem Agents connected outbound-only from the firm's Windows servers to the Files.com cloud. Through Remote Server Mounts, the on-premises systems remained the source of record without an inbound firewall change or a Citrix session to reach a file. On the partner side, outbound SFTP connections from Files.com reached each counterparty's verified server.

In between, Files.com Automations copied files on trigger or on schedule, renamed outputs to meet each partner's requirements, and archived each delivery. A SharePoint mount and Azure AD single sign-on tied Files.com into the Office 365 estate the firm already ran.

By September 2023, the first outbound automations were carrying production traffic. Gould built all of it himself.

Account Files to Advent, Trade Files to ComplySci, Month-End Holdings to BNY

The production flows read like the firm's operations diagram. When the Backstop CRM produces account-creation files, a Files.com Automation delivers them to Advent's production SFTP server and archives what it sent. Trade transaction files copy from Advent to ComplySci, the firm's trade-compliance platform, with an archived copy retained. At month end, holdings files move from Ridgeline to BNY under the firm's operating requirement that they go out the first day after the month closes: the automation triggers and the files flow. Each quarter, a multi-step chain of copy automations carries statement production end to end once Gould initiates the cycle.

From Four Counterparties to Nine Platforms, Still One IT Person

With the Files.com workflows in production, Clarkston Capital replaced a self-hosted transfer server surrounded by manual handling with an orchestration estate that runs on trigger and on schedule.

• The Serv-U server is retired. There is no transfer infrastructure for the firm to host, patch, or keep alive.
• An exchange that began with four external counterparties now runs production integrations across Advent, Backstop, ComplySci, BNY, Ridgeline, SS&C GlobeOp, SS&C ALPS, SharePoint and Office 365, and Power BI.
• Quarterly reporting moves more than 3,000 files each cycle through six automations rather than through hand-run scripts and uploads.
• Month-end holdings reach BNY on the first day after month end because an automation fires, not because someone remembered every step on the right morning.

Today, file exchange at Clarkston Capital is a system one person operates rather than work one person performs.

Adding a custodian, administrator, or vendor platform is now an outbound connection and an automation: configuration on a platform Gould already operates, not another scripting project layered onto a manual routine. The firm can keep taking on clients, and the custodians, administrators, and platforms that come with them, without its counterparty roster setting the size of its IT function.