Shares in Nasstar (LON:NASA) rose by 34% to 8.38p this morning on news that the Hosted Desktop cloud computing specialist had entered into a three year distribution agreement with intY Ltd, an aggregator and global distributor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The deal will see intY sell Nasstar Hosted Desktop under its own brand and through its strategic partners which include several major ISPs and telcos. Under the terms of the agreement intY has agreed a target distribution of 10,000 Hosted Desktop subscribers, including medium and enterprise businesses.

intY’s services include Hosted Exchange, BlackBerry, Sharepoint, web and email security. The company is one of the first global partners to secure a Microsoft BPOS syndicated partner agreement whereby Microsoft's online services, known as BPOS, will be sold directly by intY. The Nasstar Hosted Desktop application will fully integrate with this solution.

Charles Black, the chief executive of Nasstar, said: “This partnership has been formed on the basis of building significant volume sales for Nasstar Hosted Desktop. We have been developing our Hosted Desktop service since 2004 and this year have released our latest version with Windows 7 and Microsoft Office Professional 2010. Our channel partner strategy creates opportunities for volume sales whilst enabling us to focus resources on continued R&D. intY have established themselves as a major UK aggregator and this partnership provides significant reach for Hosted Desktop into the fast evolving cloud market.”

Chris Baldock, the managing director of intY, said: “We see SaaS as a rapidly evolving market and our vision is to drive growth of the SaaS market by being an aggregator for the supply of enterprise class SaaS solutions into a multi-vendor application delivery model through our array of strategic ISP and telco partners. A key component of this vision is a Hosted Desktop solution that can deliver a desktop, Microsoft Office and a large range of other key business applications in the cloud. We believe Nasstar's Hosted Desktop solution is the best in the world and we have the ability to generate strong sales from both bundling Hosted Desktop with other Microsoft online services that we are selling, and through our channel of strategic partners."

In the six months to March 31, 2010, Nasstar saw turnover increase by 10% to £1.155m and Ebitda rise to £127,000 from £3,000 in…

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