Over 60 charities have signed up to Charity Cloud, the cloud services partnership between appiChar and ThinkGrid that launched last September.

The deal sees appiChar customers being offered ThinkGrid’s portfolio of cloud computing services, including Hosted Virtual Desktop, Exchange, VoIP, Software-as-a-service and Virtual Server Infrastructure, on a per-user, per-month basis. Such services can cut complexity, boost efficiency and lower IT costs, the suppliers claim.

Richard Ferriman, chief executive at appiChar, said that  more than 60 clients have joined the Charity Cloud since it launched.

The past six months have been very focused on educating customers about the potential of cloud services, he said, and charities have tended to take a “stepping stone approach” to cloud adoption.  

“For instance, they’ll start with a service like cloud storage and then progress to adopt a broader range of solutions including hosted virtual desktops.”

But he added the education stage was coming to an end and on current trends, the company is expecting client numbers to double over the next year.