Caliber Modernizes for Growth, Efficiency

Caliber Financial Services, Inc., a professional portfolio management corporation chartered by the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, faced growing data storage sprawl that threatened its operational efficiency.

To address this challenge, the corporation partnered with Dell Technologies to implement a modern on-premise platform, enabling more strategic decision-making and streamlined resource management.

By 2020, Caliber was enjoying rapid growth, with customer requests skyrocketing from a few million to nearly 12 million per week. This surge put significant pressure on its IT infrastructure, leading to uncontrolled data and storage sprawl that threatened customer service continuity. To modernize its data center and ensure scalability, Caliber sought a reliable solution that would keep all equipment within the Otoe-Missouria reservation.

Through its partnership with Dell Technologies, Caliber implemented a tiered architecture using PowerFlex and PowerStore via APEX Subscriptions, PowerFlex for mission-critical underwriting tasks, and PowerStore for internal accounting, financial, marketing data, and unrelated databases.

“Dell Technologies worked with us to architect a solution that could scale as we needed.” Doug Oliveira, chief information officer for Caliber Financial Services, said in a statement.

This solution drove growth and cost savings, significantly improved response times, improved efficiency, and supported the company’s continued expansion.

Oliveira explained that via PowerFlex, automated responses now manage 85 percent of loan approvals, significantly reducing human intervention, cutting costs, and freeing resources for developing innovative, scalable customer-facing services.

Caliber can also respond to customer requests much more quickly, which Oliveira said means “we can continue to grow at speed.”

And by using PowerStore within their PowerFlex ecosystem, Caliber adopted a tiered storage approach that significantly enhances efficiency.

“The deployment of PowerFlex and PowerStore has not only reduced our heating and cooling demands, which was crucial for our limited-capacity data center, but PowerStore made it easier and more cost-effective to purchase additional storage when required, resulting in an impressive 75 percent savings per megabyte stored”, said Oliveira.

With this new tiered architecture, Caliber has also freed up funds for community projects –including tribal services such as childcare, elder care, infrastructure development, water treatment, and affordable housing – significantly benefiting the broader Otoe-Missouria Tribe.