Q&A With Chris Grandi Of Abacus Group, A Hedge Fund’s IT Helper

Of the 25 clients you added in the first quarter, was there some sort of common thread in what they were looking for from your company?

First and foremost, they want to outsource as many services as possible; obviously IT being the predominant service. But of the largest clients that we were taking on in Q1, we were taking from existing IT staff, so they had a pretty big on-site footprint or a data center or hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment that have been there that were coming off warranty and they were just [desiring to] get out of the IT business.

From our standpoint, the fact that we had built a private cloud network was somewhat compelling because … they wouldn’t have to buy any additional equipment.