05:12 PM
Eze Castle Debuts Hosted IT for Hedge Funds
Eze Castle Integration today rolled out a web version of its "hedge fund hotel" for small hedge funds with fewer than 10 people. Through the hotel or managed suite offering the company introduced in November 2007, it provides office space, computers loaded with basic office software, market data feeds, BlackBerry services, a telecom infrastructure, conference rooms, a receptionist, a 24x7 help desk, a shared data center and disaster recovery via data replication to Eze Castle's Boston data center.
The new offering, Eze Managed Services, provides all of the above — except for the office space, telecom, conference rooms and receptionist — over the Internet using Citrix servers and thin clients. It includes email, file and print servers and a network switch outside of the client site. Users pay a monthly subscription fee for this hosted platform and they need to purchase desktops and basic networking; a T1 connection is typically recommended. Encryption secures the data shared over the connection.
"We act as a cloud," says Bob Guilbert, managing director. "As we add more applications to our back end data center, we'll enable clients to get things like CRM services, accounting services and anything else that might be necessary to run a back office operation. The benefit of this solution is they don't have to build out an IT infrastructure, they don't have to build out a data center. That makes it very easy for them to become operational."