Across Wall Street IT organizations are being asked to do more with less, and increasingly firms are turning to software as a service to cut overhead. In particular, SaaS - hosted software that is accessed over the Web - has become common at firms that have fewer IT resources. "It was a no-brainer," says John Quinlan, cohead of sales and operations at long/short equity technology fund Kelvingrove Partners, of the firm's decision to leverage SaaS. The Naples, Fla.-based fund-which launched Jan. 5,2009 -uses SaaS for non-core applications, such as e-mail and customer relationship management, according to Quinlan, who points out that the firm's trading systems are entirely in-house. When first looking at Salesforce's CRM application, Quinlan recalls, he immediately thought, "This is great. I don't have to think about IT, whether my server is up or down, hiring an IT person and keeping that person busy, where my servers are going to go, how I'm going to keep them cool, and whether or not I have the most cutting-edge technology. I can let someone else do that for me."
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