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September 28, 2009

Nasstar refinances for desktop-as-a-service push

Primed for reseller and hosting platform initiatives

By CBR Staff Writer

Desktop-as-a-service pioneer Nasstar plc has raised the best part of £1 million through a placing of new ordinary shares to further develop its hosting platform and put more behind its push into the indirect reseller markets.

Nasstar said it would be taking on extra funding earlier this year when it announced intentions to fund a partner programme among the reseller channel, and further develop its Nasstar hosted desktop platform. 

Of the £900,000 being invested in the company, £200,000 will be used to repay debt but the rest will put into building out its presence in the emerging cloud computing market, a company director told us.

Nasstar’s primary route to market is a recently launched partner programme initiative which already has 16 companies contracted to sell its Hosted Desktop and Hosted Exchange services. “It’s been 12 months in development and is just now started to get some traction,” Damion Greef, Operations Director explained. Another ten resellers are being lined up, the company said.

Founded in 1998, AIM-listed Nasstar offers services that enables subscribers to draw computing resources from out of the internet cloud, with access to their desktop, files, applications and email being made over the internet rather than across an on-premise LAN.

It currently supports 1,000 live desktops and will add to that with another 800 hosted desktops that are currently under contract and which will be delivered to clients in the coming months.

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The customer base is drawn from a spread of industry sectors, but Greef told us that of late smaller businesses with offices located across dispersed geographies are seeing the attraction in the desktop-as-a-service proposition.

“Businesses like estate agencies and recruitment firms want to position themselves to able to gear up as the economy comes back,” he explained. Being able to provision desktops wherever they are needed and without the need for any major capital expenditure in new infrastructure and software is proving very attractive, he suggested.

With the credit crunch biting, organisations have found that they can’t afford to make capital investments in PCs. Commentators argue this is not a blip but a sign of things to come. 

Gartner has confirmed more businesses will begin the turn towards hosted desktops and cloud services in preference to investing in on-premise hardware and software.

Six months ago it predicted the fastest growing server workload running in the data centre over the next two to three years is going to be the desktop. The analyst house also believes it is going to be the fastest growing client architecture over the next few years. 

It is estimated that the hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013, reaching 49 million units.

Worldwide revenue for the market segment could grow from about $1.5 billion in 2009 to around $65.7 billion in 2013, or roughly from 1% to 40% of the worldwide professional PC market.

With Nasstar’s hosted desktop service, a user can access all the usual Office applications via the internet, and tap into any document, company file or data held in that or some other popular business package like Sage accounts or CRM, with the service secured, monitored and managed out of Nasstar’s own data centres.

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