Imagine shifts towards buy side

New York-based Imagine Software is adding the buy side to its business portfolio. Ray Krastins, Imagine’s director of application service provision (ASP) sales and marketing, told sister publication Buy Side IT that demand for the large enterprise-type installations of the sell-side has waned due to a combination of shrinking budgets and a saturated market.

“We morphed from providing enterprise installations to ASPs, although we continue to support both,” said Krastins, adding that cost was the main catalyst of change. “Cash is definitely driving people and their IT purchasing decisions – firms have needs, but they often haven’t got the budget to spend $2 million with PricewaterhouseCoopers to do a consulting gig to find out how much it is going to cost them to dump their old system and bring in an entirely new one.”

But the slump in demand for Imagine’s enterprise business has been more than offset by the growth of the company’s ASP service, launched in the second quarter of 2001.

“Business is up by 90% compared with last year,” said Krastins. “But last year was difficult because, just as we started to get traction, September 11 hit us. That put us back three or four months, as even though we were supporting and growing within our existing customer base, the atmosphere was not conducive for doing anything new or starting new projects.”

Imagine lost two key staff members in the September 11 attacks and found itself displaced for almost two months from its lower Manhattan premises.

Krastins said Imagine has already signed “about 100 hedge funds, and maybe a few more”, with the ratio of US to UK-registered funds being around 70/30. Hedge funds including Millennium Partners, JMG Capital Partners, Chilton Investment Company, GDO Capital and Titan Capital have signed with the New York vendor.