Agio is an information technology (IT) outsourcing company with their corporate headquarters located in New York, New York. Within the overall domain of IT outsourcing, the firm has a particular strength in assisting hedge fund companies in this process.
The need for a better means of managing the IT infrastructures in this particular business sector arose out of the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008. On January 17, 2010, Agio wAs founded to address this need. Bart McDonough came to the marketplace offering a tailored IT outsourcing solution for hedge funds. This consisted of offering server and network management, database administration, storage and quality assurance services as well as help desk support. Bart McDonough now leads the efforts of the firm, serving as Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Bart brings a wealth of skill and experience to this task. He has more than 20 years of experience regarding IT management in the hedge fund industry, including business development, cybersecurity and overall IT infrastructure management. Bart’s core strengths he brings to clients of Agio are both deep and wide. These include assessing, defining and putting in place best-in-class risk management models, controls and strategies. Leveraging these skills, Bart and his team of more than 200 dedicated employees have designed managed IT and cybersecurity tools tailored to protect the most important assets of companies in the hedge fund industry — money and reputation.
One example of this singular expertise that Bart McDonough and his team at Agio bring to this market sector is diagnosing and then fixing an errant IT setting at Bloomberg Professional Services that could have allowed over 300,000 subscribers to be compromised. Before founding Agio, Bart was Manager of Operations for Optimark Technologies (1998 – 2000), Director of Business Development at Bluestone Capital Partners (2000 – 2001) and Managing Director, System Architecture for SAC Capital Advisors (2001 – 2010). Currently Bart is a Member of the Board of Directors at two cybersecurity companies, Magnus Cloud and TwoSense.AI. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of IT outsourcing for hedge funds. Some of these engagements include speeches at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Atlas Holdings
Burt McDonough authored a press release for the Agio web site that spoke about some of the best practices for IT outsourcing for hedge funds. In the article, McDonough addresses his points to Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Senior IT Managers at hedge fund companies who have all likely considered IT outsourcing of one form or another.
He points out that the hedge fund IT environment is somewhat unique regarding IT provisioning in that the funds managed can have very large revenues that require rock-solid critical applications and yet may have a relatively small physical scale compared to some other companies and industries. Bart covers a few main topics, one of these being when to outsource. He admits that every hedge fund company is different and the time to outsource IT operations can vary. However, he points out that in most cases it comes down to one key consideration regarding internal IT operations — a consistent failure to meet the service levels demanded by executive management.
