December 16, 2009 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – ThinkGrid, a leading platform vendor enabling IT services from the cloud today announced that care provider the Independent Living Group (ILG), will deploy 100 ThinkGrid Hosted Virtual Desktops across its head office and registered care homes across South England. ILG will also use ThinkGrid’s platform to host Cold Harbour, an industry standard management application for care providers, as well as ThinkGrid’s low cost Hosted Exchange solution. ThinkGrid’s services will replace ILG’s existing Citrix-based hosted solution, moving the entire IT operation to a fully supported and highly scalable enterprise-class cloud infrastructure. ILG will continue to enjoy the benefits of reduced CapEx by purchasing IT on a pay-as-you-use basis, and make additional savings by deploying ThinkGrid services on its existing desktop hardware. 

“Whilst there’s no doubting the role IT plays in improving the quality of the care we provide, it can still be a huge cost and management burden. In order to maintain ILG’s (Independent Living Group) high standards of care, it is critical to remain focused on delivering the best service possible to the people we support, which is why we have pursued an outsourced IT strategy that allows us to drive greater efficiency in our day-to-day operations,” said Alex Korniak, IT Consultant for ILG. “The challenge now is that ILG has reached a size where for many similar businesses the obvious next step is to invest in an internal IT to retain quality, whilst reducing outsourcing costs. So when the time came to review our existing IT services contract, we needed a partner who would be able to sustain our outsourcing strategy without compromise. I recommended ThinkGrid’s cloud platform as it gives ILG the best of both worlds: high quality and affordable IT services.”

Managing and maintaining IT can become time consuming for organisations such as ILG; PCs need to be patched and maintained, email and file servers must be managed, applications need to be updated and software licences kept up-to-date. With ThinkGrid’s IT services from the cloud, these pains are taken away and the IT infrastructure grows and contracts in line with the business, with customers only paying for what they use on a monthly basis. Staff at ILG’s 43 learning and disability homes will now benefit from ThinkGrid’s Hosted Virtual Desktop and Hosted Exchange services, which will run on their existing PCs:

• Hosted Virtual Desktops look and work exactly like traditional PCs, but users connect over the Internet to their desktop, which is hosted on a secure ThinkGrid cloud infrastructure. Staff at ILG will continue to use familiar applications including Microsoft Office and the Cold Harbour application, which are all delivered as a service. Moving to a hosted desktop model creates additional benefits such as mobile working, reduced management overhead, and full disaster recovery protection. 

• Hosted Exchange allows ILG to benefit from enterprise email and collaboration both in the office and on the move. The service grows alongside ILG’s business, with user accounts added as needed but without the pain of management and provisioning. 

According to Rob Lovell, CEO at ThinkGrid: “For many outsourced IT contracts there can be a high degree of pain involved in switching services to another supplier. In a matter of one weekend it’s been possible to move ILG’s entire infrastructure over to our cloud platform so they could literally start using our services with no impact on day-to-day operations when staff returned to the office on Monday morning.” He continued: “By moving IT to the cloud, businesses become less dependent on expensive infrastructure such as servers and PCs. In fact, ILG is extending the life of their existing PCs because Hosted Virtual Desktops perform effectively even on low spec machines such as thin-clients. All in all, ILG are proving how many businesses today can significantly transform the way they use, purchase and manage IT by adopting the cloud services model.”

About ThinkGrid

ThinkGrid provides IT services from the Cloud. Launched with the aim of disrupting the way that businesses currently purchase, use and manage IT, ThinkGrid provides enterprise class IT to small and medium businesses through its network of partners. ThinkGrid removes the management and cost burden of owning IT by offering it to customers as an on demand service. Its current services include Hosted Virtual Desktop, Exchange and Communications, VoIP, Software-as-a-Service, Virtual Server Infrastructure and Cloud Storage. With ThinkGrid, each user is given their own personalised IT that operates in exactly the same way as a traditional computing environment. The difference is that with ThinkGrid’s Cloud Computing platform, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world through an Internet connection. ThinkGrid customers only pay for what they use based on the needs of the business, and can scale up and down at the click of a mouse.