The company, which supplies software to 14,000 of the 30,000 UK accounting practices, is partnering with Internet service provider and hosting specialist, CI-Net, with the aim of helping customers to reduce their IT management burden and improve cost control.

 

Mark Ellis, Director of Services, IRIS Accountancy Practice Solutions, explained: “Looking after their IT set up is a growing challenge for accountancy practices. They’re using increasingly sophisticated technology that is becoming critical to the service they offer to clients. By providing the option to take our software as a managed service offering via ‘the cloud’, we’re hoping to take a big chunk of the IT management hassle out of our customers’ hands - so they can focus on core business.”

 

“With IRIS Practice Hosting firms can allow their staff to access their practice systems from anywhere with an Internet connection and they can pay for additional users as their business grows,” added Mark Ellis.

 

Within the IRIS Practice Hosting offering, CI-Net is also hosting the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft Exchange for email and other desktop applications. The company will look after the security, maintenance, upgrades, backup and licence management tasks for customers’ software and data.

 

“We chose CI-Net based on its excellent resilient IT infrastructure and processes and its extensive experience in the hosting business. We’ve worked closely together to get the IRIS Practice Hosting offering right for our customers,” said Mark Ellis.CI-Net is hosting the applications in professional data centres with multiple power feeds, multiple internet connections, fire suppression systems and round-the-clock monitoring and security guards.

 

Graham McLean, MD of CI-Net, added that allowing a professional infrastructure service provider to manage the software and IT environment from their own centralised location means businesses no longer have to buy their own powerful local computers to run applications. More importantly it removes the burden of having to manage a complex infrastructure which is a task often performed by non IT experts in smaller businesses. Customers only need basic PC capability so this model significantly increases the length of time PCs or laptops can be useful, allowing businesses to realise more value from their fixed assets.

 

He described the way in which firms stand to gain from the automatic inclusion of software updates within the hosted offering: “The cloud computing model is very attractive to accountancy practices because of the high frequency of software updates to keep pace with changing financial regulations - which means they are forced to configure updates to their systems on a regular basis. With IRIS’ hosted software, we make this happen automatically to free customers from the effort and possible disruption.”

 

IRIS Practice Hosting is available as part of Open IRIS10, a major update and expansion of the company’s flagship products for accountants in practice.