Credit crunched small to medium sized businesses
(SMBs) are being offered what Alchemy Systems
describes as the solution to their business computing needs: all
for £9.99 (+VAT) a month.
The company is offering a hosted service called
Virtual Open Desktop which
it claims will deliver to SMBs a complete business productivity
solution based on Open Office, a multitude of email clients
(including Zimbra and Thunderbird) and the FireFox web browser.
Alchemy will host and secure centrally all of the component
parts of the
software as a service model (SaaS) solution.
Data is protected and kept private by Alchemy Systems with each
customer having access to a separate virtual machine and all data
is backed-up to an off site location. The solution includes an IGEL
Universal Desktop with the aims of keeping customer hardware energy
efficient as well as easy to support remotely.
Customers can work with Microsoft documents given the document
format support from Open Office and the default document format for
read and write can be set to Microsoft. Customers wanting to have
additional corporate applications such as SAP, Sage, Netsuite or
Salesforce.com can access them using the included Firefox web
browser.
“In today’s difficult economic climate, small and medium-sized
business owners need to be able to concentrate on their business
rather than worry about their IT infrastructure,” said Nathan
Mills, managing director of Alchemy Systems.