OpenView Venture Partners

Outbound Lead Generation Management Workshop

Megan McNeill — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:25:09 +0000

Outbound Lead Generation Management Workshop

Wednesday, July 17th, 9am – 4:30pm - Thursday, July 18th, 9am – 12pm

OpenView Studios

In July 2013, OpenView will be hosting a workshop for its portfolio team members who are building or managing outbound lead generation teams. Portfolio CEOs and senior executives interested in learning more about outbound lead generation management are also welcome to attend.

The agenda will include presentations and discussions around:

Improving messaging and prospecting strategies to increase conversions
Industry and portfolio metrics and benchmarks
Tools and technology to enhance prospecting efforts
Compensation and incentives for outbound lead generation teams
How to recruit top talent and manage the performance of reps, both qualitatively and quantitatively
Strategies for working with marketing to develop campaigns and ongoing nurturing programs

Instructure, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and IMS Global Launch the LTI App Bounty

newscontributor — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:03:34 +0000

Instructure, maker of the Canvas learning platform, announced at the IMS Global Conference today that it is partnering with Blackboard, Desire2Learn and IMS Global Learning Consortium to encourage development of new LTI®apps for education.

As part of the "LTI App Bounty," Instructure is offering a $250 reward for each qualifying LTI app submitted by June 10, plus an additional $1,000 for the best apps selected by an expert panel of judges from Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Remote-Learner, IMS Global, Brown University, The University of Texas at Austin and Hack Education.

"The LTI standard makes integration of educational resources exponentially easier and fuels innovation in education," said Dr.Rob Abel , chief executive of IMS Global. "We commend Instructure and the industry-leading organizations supporting IMS for working together to grow an open and innovative education ecosystem."

Launched by IMS Global in 2010, LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) provides standard APIs and data integrations for developers to create education apps that operate cross-platform. The goal of the LTI App Bounty is to leverage interest in LTI as a way to increase openness and interoperability in edtech.

"Cooperation in education is fundamental to learning, and I believe it's fundamental to creating a technology ecosystem," saidBrian Whitmer , co-founder and chief product officer at Instructure. "Unfortunately, old style vendor lock-in has been a drag on the level of innovation and growth of a true edtech ecosystem. But with initiatives like the App Bounty, we're working to fix that."

"Desire2Learn has been a contributing member to IMS GLC for almost a decade and has taken a leadership position in the development and proliferation of standards," said Jeremy Auger , chief technology officer at Desire2Learn. "We are excited to be a part of any effort that furthers the adoption of the LTI standard and increases the availability of integrated learning experiences."

"I am very excited to be a part of this project and see what kind of apps it produces," said Chuck Severance , chief Sakai strategist at Blackboard. "Anything we can do to foster innovation and collaboration among edtech users — and each other — is good for the entire education industry. The LTI App Bounty does a good job at encouraging both."

The LTI App Bounty panel of judges includes:

Rob Abel , CEO of IMS Global
Hong Chau , Instructional Designer at Brown University
Barry Dahl , Community Manager at Desire2Learn
Chuck Severance , Chief Sakai Strategist , Blackboard
Audrey Watters , Edtech Journalist for Hack Education
David Wiley , Openness Evangelist and Shuttleworth Fellow
Katherine Grace Gordon , Computer Science Student at The University of Texas at Austin
Jason Cole , CEO and Moodle Author at Remote-Learner

For information about how to participate in the LTI App Bounty, visit http://instructure.github.io/lti_bounty.html For information about IMS LTI, visit http://developers.imsglobal.org/catalog.html

About Instructure

Instructure is a technology company committed to improving education. We provide instructors and students with modern tools and resources that empower and simplify the learning experience. Instructure offers Canvas, the open, easy-to-use, cloud-native learning management system, as well as Canvas Network, an index of open, online courses by educators everywhere — from Ivy League institutions to community colleges.

About Blackboard Inc.

Blackboard Inc. is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. Blackboard's solutions allow thousands of higher education, K-12, professional, corporate and government organizations to extend teaching and learning online, facilitate campus commerce and security and communicate more effectively with their communities. Founded in 1997, Blackboard is headquartered inWashington, D.C., with offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. To learn more about Blackboard, visithttp://www.blackboard.com/

About Desire2Learn

Desire2Learn is helping to transform the way the world learns. Providing the next generation learning environment and solutions to engage and inspire lifelong learners, Desire2Learn helps clients break down barriers to access the highest quality learning experiences, and is recognized for its leadership in accessibility. Desire2Learn is a global leader in cloud (SaaS) based learning solutions and provides an open and extensible platform to over 750 clients and over 10 million learners in higher education, K-12, healthcare, government and the corporate sector, including the Fortune 1000. Desire2Learn has personnel in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Brazil and Singapore. For more information or to contact us, visithttp://www.Desire2Learn.com

About IMS Global

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors Learning Impact: a global awards program and conference to recognize the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability and quality. To learn more about IMS Global, visit http://www.imsglobal.org

Increased Enterprise Demand for Hybrid Cloud Fuels Skytap Growth

newscontributor — Tue, 14 May 2013 23:03:44 +0000

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced that its customer base has grown to include 250 enterprise and mid-market customers. Combined, Skytap customers have launched more than two million virtual machines (VMs) in Skytap Cloud. Rapid customer growth and increasing usage has also led Skytap to significantly expand its infrastructure footprint to include multiple North American data center locations.

Enterprise companies are increasingly deploying a hybrid cloud computing architecture, attracted by the ability to connect on-premise private cloud and virtualized infrastructure with a secure public cloud infrastructure. This enables enterprise teams to benefit from the elastic, scalable, on-demand nature of public cloud computing resources with the existing security, tools, and processes used internally today. Collaborative teams that have moved complex environments into a hybrid cloud solution see increased business agility, speed and productivity, and lower costs. Skytap's award-winning hybrid cloud solution offers enterprise customers a simple way to securely extend their on-premise infrastructure into the cloud. Skytap Cloud features a unique technology layer called the Intelligent Automation Platform, which delivers sophisticated automation and self-service capabilities designed to make complex cloud computing environments fast, easy and intuitive. The Intelligent Automation Platform enables advanced product capabilities for teams, including remote access to VMs from any browser or native RDP device, software defined networking for complex multi-machine environments, automated control, management and administration, and rich collaboration across teams, projects, and geographic locations.

"Over the past several months, the enterprise IT industry has demonstrated a heightened demand for hybrid cloud solutions, drawn by the unique combination of on-premise infrastructure and easily-accessible hosted environments that offer increased scalability, flexibility and security," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap. "We have experienced significant growth as enterprise IT organizations, and development and test teams, rapidly implement Skytap Cloud to revolutionize the way they build, deploy, and test innovative new software."

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap Cloud gives businesses a fast, easy, and secure way to create complex computing environments in the cloud. Customers can run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations maintain full visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap Cloud to their data centers and create hybrid clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including development and testing, software demos and evaluations, and virtual training. To try Skytap Cloud and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

Exinda Boosts Traffic Control to 10Gbps

newscontributor — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:56:54 +0000

Exinda Networks Inc. has released an upgraded version of its top of line network optimization appliance which can shape network traffic at up to 10 Gigabits per second.

The model 100062 – which replaces the 10060 – is a 2U-sized data centre class appliance that can handle up to 400,000 users in large enterprises or service providers.

The previous model could only offer network control at 5 Gbps.

Like all six models of Exinda appliances, the Network Optimization Suite gives Layer 7 level visibility into application traffic and with policy-based bandwidth allocation, Cory Badcock, the company’s director inline product management, said in an interview. It would prove useful in segmenting traffic at universities, he said, where the institution has traffic generated by the administration and by students. The 10062 has an optimization capacity of 310 Mbps, or 45,000 connections, and an edge cache capacity of 225 Mpbs. It costs US $175,000. The 10062 is one of five new or updated models in the lineup of Toronto-based Exinda. The others are the 4010 for branches, the 4061 (with more RAM than the previous version), the 6062 (replaces the 6060) and the 8062 (replaces the 8060).

They differ in capabilities. For example, the 8062 offers network control at 5 Gpbs.

Exinda targets branches

Exinda also said it has added new capabilities to its Network Optimization Suite, which runs on the same hardware.

Version 6.4 of the firmware gives improved visibility with new layer 7 application signatures for applications like LinkedIn, Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Skydrive. “It allows network administrators to more easily identify that traffic and make decisions on how they want to treat it,” said Badcock. Previously if a staffer used Skydrive it would have shown up as general TCP traffic. Identifiying app traffic with more precision allows network administrators to better decide whether it needs more bandwidth or if certain users should be give priority access. Appliances can now create a baseline application performance score, which allows them to understand how an app is performing. Until now administrators had to create the baseline themselves. Baseline scoring makes it easier to configure the network. Administrators will also be able to cluster multiple Exinda appliances either through higher availability or load balanced environments. Appliances can share configuration and monitoring policies as if a single appliance, or one could be set up for failover protection. Finally, the firmware update gives faster optimization performance of SMBv2 and MAPI traffic, which will benefit organizations with large file shares or Microsoft Exchange.

OpenView Publishes eBook on Outbound B2B Lead Generation

newscontributor — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:04:33 +0000

OpenView is pleased to announce the release of its latest eBook, Get More Customers! How to Build an Outbound B2B Lead Generation Team that Drives Sales. Targeted at CEOs and heads of sales at expansion-stage technology companies, the eBook outlines how to determine if outbound lead generation is right for your organization, and create and manage outbound lead generation programs that get results.

“Generating high-quality leads is one of the greatest challenges any B2B company faces,” explained Devon McDonald, Director of Sales and Marketing Support at OpenView Labs. “Because it’s a particular issue for expansion-stage companies, our latest eBook provides a detailed guide to building successful lead generation teams that help lower costs, reveal market intelligence, and allow you to vet prospects before they move too far along your sales process.”

OpenView's new eBook was written specifically to help expansion-stage executives:

Understand what outbound lead generation is and why it’s important
Learn the components of a successful outbound lead generation implementation
Improve your outbound approach and process
Explore the various technologies available to sales managers and how to utilize them effectively to manage the outbound lead generation process

In addition to sharing OpenView’s insights from working with its 20 portfolio companies around the country, the eBook is supplemented with ideas and best practices from an array of sales experts, including Brian Carroll, Executive Diretor, Revenue Optimization, MECLABS, and Anneke Seley, CEO and Founder, Reality Works Group.

“Our eBook outlines small but crucial adjustments you can make to increase your team’s productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness,” said McDonald. “It also provides a framework for the many nuances and complexities of building — or improving — a high-functioning outbound lead generation program.”

OpenView’s eBooks support its mission of building great companies by providing expansion-stage companies with the operationally oriented tools and support they need to succeed. The firm’s recent eBooks span a variety of topics, including board optimization, customer segmentation, marketing channel discovery, sales forecasts, competitive messaging, and operating reviews. To find out more, visit http://labs.openviewpartners.com/ebooks/. A companion report will be published later in the month examining sales benchmarks that expansion-stage companies can use to build a scalable B2B outbound lead generation program.

Precor(R), Exinda Team Up to Sculpt the Next-Generation Fitness Experience

newscontributor — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:06:15 +0000

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and Network Control solutions, today announced a partnership with Precor®, a leading home and commercial fitness equipment manufacturer, to enhance the Preva®fitness experience for clubs and their patrons. Exercise facilities are able to extend this powerful solution to their users, while easily managing and controlling the associated traffic.

Precor has been a fitness industry innovator for more than 30 years, and the company's latest market innovation – Preva – allows users to experience networked fitness: the inspired connection of people and the technology that empowers their fitness journey. Using Preva in conjunction with the Precor P80 touchscreen console, gyms as well as fitness centers at universities and hotels, can provide a personalized workout experience to their customers. Not only can users access streaming content from the web, including video, as they work out, but they can also store their workouts and access them from anywhere in the world, customize their training based on previous workouts, and set and track fitness goals online based on duration, calorie burn and/or distance. As workouts are completed, Preva keeps exercisers motivated by awarding achievement badges for reaching key milestones, such as the "New Yorker" for walking or running the length of Manhattan Island. Preva also enables management tools that allow fitness club managers to remotely monitor equipment and update to the latest software, allowing them to make better decisions about maintenance and making their machines last for a longer period of time. Exinda's WAN optimization and Network Control solutions optimize the club's network, allowing it to handle the additional bandwidth required to provide such advanced services to both exercise facility owners and members. After evaluating several potential partners, Precor has put Exinda's solutions in more than 140 fitness centers where Preva is in place, including some of the top fitness center brands in the industry.

"Exinda is ensuring that the appropriate bandwidth and reliability is there to provide an optimal networked fitness experience for our customers and their users," said Brent Brooks, Precor Vice President of Networked Fitness. "It's this kind of outstanding performance that drives our product and services roadmap forward, and allows us to exploit today's product capabilities while ensuring we can deliver and support even more exciting experiences in the future."

"Precor is a clear leader in the fitness industry and a perfect partner to demonstrate how networked technologies are moving into all aspects of our lives," said Kevin Kirksey, Vice President of North American Sales at Exinda. "Exinda's solutions allow fitness centers – which have varying degrees of IT expertise – to easily handle the influx of traffic generated by this next-generation of fitness. The result is an exceptional fitness experience for gyms and exercisers alike."

Exinda's WAN Optimization and Network Control solutions are on display at Interop through May 9, 2013, in Booth 1667 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

About Exinda

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Internet Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,600 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com. Follow us on Twitter at @Exinda.

About Precor

Precor designs and builds premium fitness equipment for effective workouts that feel smooth and natural. With a passionate focus on ergonomic motion, insight driven innovation, and superior engineering, the company continually advances the home and commercial fitness industry with breakthrough new product categories, including, EFX® Elliptical, Adaptive Motion Trainer® "AMT®" and Preva® Networked Fitness. Precor is a subsidiary of Amer Sports Corporation, the world's largest sports equipment company, with internationally recognized brands Wilson, Atomic, Suunto, Salomon, Arc'Teryx and Mavic.

Serguei Beloussov Appointed CEO of Acronis

newscontributor — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:56:44 +0000

Serguei Beloussov has been named CEO of Acronis, effective immediately. He succeeds Alex Pinchev. Mr. Beloussov is a co-founder of Acronis and was the Company’s first President. He has been a member of the Acronis Board of Directors since 2002 and is also the Chairman of Parallels, a global leader in hosting and cloud services enablement and desktop virtualization software.

"I am very excited to be back at Acronis,” said Mr. Beloussov. “Acronis is a leader in traditional backup and recovery solutions, and is leading the way forward with new solutions that protect, secure, and access a company's valuable data. The Company has a solid strategy for growth in virtual, Cloud and mobility markets. With leading technology and strong execution we will take a very good company and make it a great company.”

About Acronis

Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today’s complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organisations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organisations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac® in the enterprise.

Philadelphia Business Journal Names Xtium CTO ‘Top IT Innovator’

newscontributor — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:19:42 +0000

Xtium, Inc., a leading enterprise software and solutions company providing managed cloud hosting, online backup and virtual disaster recovery services, today announced that its Chief Technology Officer, Tim Vogel, was named a “Top IT Innovator” by the Philadelphia Business Journal, as part of the journal’s “2013 Top IT Pros Awards.” He will be honored at a celebratory awards luncheon on Thursday, May 9, 11:00am - 2:00pm at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

As one of Xtium’s co-founders, Vogel grew the company from a small technology consulting firm in 2004 into a fully managed services provider focused on virtual hosting and disaster recovery in 2007. Under his leadership, Xtium became one of the first companies to offer virtual cloud hosting services, before the term “cloud” was widely used. Vogel also helped Xtium win its first multi-year, multi-million dollar deal in 2007, in which the technology he built helped support the customer’s IT operations, growth and acquisitions. Since then, he has led the Xtium team to drive business efficiencies and competitive advantages for a number of small- to mid-sized companies. His innovative approach to cloud computing allows companies to transfer the complexity and responsibility of infrastructure management to partners like Xtium, which enables the organizations to focus on their core competencies instead of managing their IT infrastructure. In regards to the Top IT Pros Awards selection process, the Philadelphia Business Journal states, “We're recognizing those leaders whose roles have evolved from miners of communication systems and computers to indispensable strategic advisors and operations experts. These leaders have their head in the cloud, are social, and constantly innovate to capture competitive advantage. They also defend against cyber security issues to protect both the company and its customers.” Vogel said, “I’m honored to achieve this prestigious award from the Philadelphia Business Journal. I look forward to continuing to help organizations benefit from virtualization, cloud and new technologies in the future.”

About Xtium

VersionOne Introduces Agile Portfolio Timeline and Collaboration Enhancements

newscontributor — Tue, 07 May 2013 00:22:50 +0000

Spring Release Improves Enterprise Visibility, Communication and Agile Portfolio Management Capabilities

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, has announced the availability of its Spring 2013 release. With the introduction of a new Portfolio Timeline and enhanced Conversations, the new release extends VersionOne’s enterprise agile offering to help customers improve organizational visibility and collaboration and simplify coordination of their agile portfolio management (APM) initiatives. As identified by VersionOne’s recently announced State of Agile Development survey, organizations of all sizes are expanding their use of agile, with almost 50 percent now using agile practices across five or more teams. As agile adoption continues to grow and more teams are introduced to agile methods, effective management and tracking to business objectives becomes increasingly difficult. The new Portfolio Timeline allows Project Management Offices (PMOs) and project leaders to quickly get a high-level view of their portfolio of business initiatives, enabling them to see progress and identify at-risk projects. The Portfolio Timeline also allows program and project managers to drill down into each level of their project hierarchy to obtain more detailed information, driving better decision making. “This product release extends our enterprise feature set to better support customers practicing agile across their entire organization, giving them the visibility and interactive collaboration capabilities they need to manage cross-project initiatives from inception through delivery,” said Robert Holler, president and CEO of VersionOne. Additional feature updates further strengthen an organization’s ability to support enterprise-wide agile initiatives within VersionOne. These include:

Enable more effective communication through the ability to target conversations to specific groups and topics.
Provide a personalized, consolidated view of conversations each team member is currently engaged in, and current status.
Give product managers more granular control over the information that is displayed on both future and previously delivered ideas. Notifications are also included to allow customers and users to engage in timely conversations occurring around new ideas.
Allows teams to easily identify applications currently in use that can be integrated with VersionOne.

About VersionOne

VersionOne is a recognized leader and visionary in agile application lifecycle management. Our mission is to help companies envision and deliver great software. Our promise is to promote and serve the best interests of the agile software development community with genuine respect and humility. Every single day we work hard to make a difference both in our community and with our customers. Today more than 50,000 teams including over 35 of the Fortune 100 use our products to help them scale their agile initiatives faster, easier, and smarter. Whether a small team just starting out with agile or a global enterprise, VersionOne customers get the best software tools in the industry backed by the pioneers of agile project and lifecycle management. SOURCE VersionOne CONTACT: Andrea Keeble, VersionOne, (678) 468-0618, Andrea.Keeble@VersionOne.com Web site: http://www.VersionOne.com

Exinda Achieves Visionary Position in 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers

newscontributor — Thu, 02 May 2013 06:14:59 +0000

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and Network Control solutions, has announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc., as a visionary vendor in the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers.

According to Gartner, "As basic acceleration capabilities mature, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in visibility and control, both as a means to demonstrate WOC effectiveness, and as a bandwidth/response time planning tool. Providing advanced traffic management capabilities for application and user performance measurement and SLA reporting are key emerging requirements for WOC equipment."

These market conditions have allowed Exinda to thrive in the midmarket with its unique suite-based offering. Exinda is the only vendor to deliver WAN optimization, Network Control and Application Monitoring in a single, easy-to-use suite. Its WAN optimization and Network Control solutions are used by midmarket enterprises and institutions around the globe. Exinda has:

Experienced four consecutive years of strong double-digit growth
Helped more than 2,600 customers around the world assure their critical application SLAs
Established leadership in key vertical industry segments, including education, manufacturing, retail, government, financial services and hospitality
Grown channel relationships with more than 200 trusted partners around the world.

"It is an honor to be recognized as a visionary in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers," said Exinda CEOMichael Sharma . "Exinda's vision of application SLA assurance mirrors the fundamental shift we are seeing in corporate networks as they evolve away from basic throughput maximization and towards providing a predictable user experience for all network applications. By providing IT managers clear visibility into their network traffic, and giving them the ability to set policies at the user, group and application levels to prioritize that traffic, Exinda is well-positioned for success, now and in the future. "

To qualify for the 2013 WAN Optimization Controller Magic Quadrant, vendors' products needed to include traffic management capabilities, such as WAN QoS classification, enforcement or traffic shaping; compression, bandwidth reduction capabilities, including compression, caching and/or data deduplication; generic protocol acceleration (for TCP or HTTP, for example); application- or higher-level protocol-specific optimization features, such as acceleration of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) file-sharing protocol. Vendors also needed to have global installations and support capability. To access the report, please visit the Exinda website.

(1) Gartner "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers," by Joe Skorupa , Mark Fabbi , and Bjarne Munch , 29 April 2013

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Exinda

VersionOne Introduces Agile Portfolio Timeline and Collaboration Enhancements

newscontributor — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:50:57 +0000

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, today announced the availability of its Spring 2013 release.

With the introduction of a new Portfolio Timeline and enhanced Conversations, the new release extends VersionOne's enterprise agile offering to help customers improve organizational visibility and collaboration and simplify coordination of their agile portfolio management (APM) initiatives. As identified by VersionOne's recently announced State of Agile Development survey, organizations of all sizes are expanding their use of agile, with almost 50 percent now using agile practices across five or more teams. As agile adoption continues to grow and more teams are introduced to agile methods, effective management and tracking to business objectives becomes increasingly difficult. The new Portfolio Timeline allows Project Management Offices (PMOs) and project leaders to quickly get a high-level view of their portfolio of business initiatives, enabling them to see progress and identify at-risk projects. The Portfolio Timeline also allows program and project managers to drill down into each level of their project hierarchy to obtain more detailed information, driving better decision making.

"This product release extends our enterprise feature set to better support customers practicing agile across their entire organization, giving them the visibility and interactive collaboration capabilities they need to manage cross-project initiatives from inception through delivery," said Robert Holler , president and CEO of VersionOne.

Additional feature updates further strengthen an organization's ability to support enterprise-wide agile initiatives within VersionOne. These include:

Conversation Groups – enable more effective communication through the ability to target conversations to specific groups and topics.
"My Conversations" – provide a personalized, consolidated view of conversations each team member is currently engaged in, and current status.
Ideas improvements – give product managers more granular control over the information that is displayed on both future and previously delivered ideas. Notifications are also included to allow customers and users to engage in timely conversations occurring around new ideas.
Application Catalog – allows teams to easily identify applications currently in use that can be integrated with VersionOne.

For more information about the Spring 2013 product release, visit http://www.versionone.com/release/2013/spring/

About VersionOne

VersionOne is a recognized leader and visionary in agile application lifecycle management. Our mission is to help companies envision and deliver great software. Our promise is to promote and serve the best interests of the agile software development community with genuine respect and humility. Every single day we work hard to make a difference both in our community and with our customers. Today more than 50,000 teams including over 35 of the Fortune 100 use our products to help them scale their agile initiatives faster, easier, and smarter. Whether a small team just starting out with agile or a global enterprise, VersionOne customers get the best software tools in the industry backed by the pioneers of agile project and lifecycle management. Follow us on Google+,Twitter, Facebook and our blogs. Agile Made Easier @ VersionOne.com

AtTask Named “Cool Vendor” in CRM Marketing Applications 2013 Report

newscontributor — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:25:11 +0000

AtTask, the only provider of Enterprise Work Management for marketing teams today announced they had been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the Gartner Inc. report, Cool Vendors in CRM Marketing Applications, 2013.

Gartner states, "The Cool Vendors in this research offer unique marketing capabilities for MRM and distributed marketing, and a data- and workflow-driven marketing platform. These vendors provide opportunities for innovation with their specialty focus, but should be considered in a broader context for integrated marketing management (IMM), with the expectation of some risk due to their small size.

"It's great validation for AtTask and our Marketing Solutions Group to be included in Gartner's Cool Vendor report," said Eric Morgan, CEO of AtTask. "To be one of three vendors named in the report demonstrates the value that AtTask provides marketing teams and the need for our solution in this market."

The report continues, "This year's Cool Vendors in marketing applications provide more robust people and project management and distributed marketing capabilities, and a data-driven cross-channel marketing platform."

Cool brands like Tommy Hilfiger , Harry & David, Red Bull , Workday, and GoPro use AtTask for marketing teams to bring visibility, communication, and harmony to their marketing teams. AtTask is the only work management solution in the market that meets the unique needs of the enterprise: managing repeatable, structured, frequent, interdependent work that requires significant team collaboration. AtTask Enterprise Work Management for marketing teams includes:

Resource management and allocation – Optimize people resources with real-time updates on where people are working, and where they are needed
Marketing work coordination – Ensure that the right people work on the right activities at the right time with the right information.
Creative production management – Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of creative projects, including reviews and collaboration
Request management – Stop the ad hoc flow of requests by managing both internal and external work requests
Financial management – Track and forecast budgets, revenue, planned versus actual costs, ROI goals and more.
Complete Work Visibility – Check the status of individual and team work at any time, including relevant assignments, dependencies, milestones, progress, status, issues, and more.

Morgan continues, "AtTask for marketing teams eliminates the chaos marketers feel and allows them more time to stay in the right side of the brain where creativity lives."

To read the full Cool Vendors in CRM Marketing Applications, 2013 report, visit http://www.attask.com/promo/email/attask-cool-vendor.

Additional Resources:

Listen to how top marketers are solving communication and visibility problemshttp://www.attask.com/marketing/webinars/solve-visibility-problem/
Read how other marketing customers are using the AtTask http://www.attask.com/marketing/customers/
Watch how AtTask can calm the chaos of marketing teams http://www.attask.com/marketing/integrated-marketing-work-management

About AtTask

AtTask is the only provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solutions for enterprise teams. This provides a single, central place to better manage and control the chaos of enterprise work, which improves visibility and productivity by eliminating wasted time dealing with fragmented, siloed tools and processes. With AtTask, teams, managers and executives receive visibility into work planning, prioritization, resourcing and sequencing to help everyone work more efficiently toward achieving the organization's goals. AtTask has a broad range of Global 500 and other enterprise customers, such as Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, and Trek. To learn more, visit www.AtTask.com or follow us on Twitter @AtTask.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor; product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Contact:

Shelbi Gomez shelbigomez@attask.com 801-477-9813

Exinda Extends Leadership with Integrated 10Gbps Network Shaping Solution

newscontributor — Wed, 01 May 2013 05:59:01 +0000

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and Network Control solutions, has announced that it has enhanced its network-shaping capabilities, adding a 10Gbps license to its solution for mid-market data centers.

The addition of a 10Gbps license gives enterprises with growing bandwidth requirements advanced user-level visibility and network shaping in an integrated solution, resulting in more effective management of recreational traffic and assurance of critical application SLAs.

"Traditional network shaping solutions have helped mid-market enterprises ease their ongoing bandwidth crunch, but these organizations are still strained, with no visibility into whether the traffic they are shaping is mission-critical or recreational," saidAaron Brown , vice president of product management at Exinda. "Exinda is the only vendor to pair 10Gbps network-shaping capabilities with intelligent acceleration and user-level reporting in a cost-effective, single-box solution."

Exinda's enhanced network shaping solution for 10Gbps is designed to meet the needs of high-traffic data centers, including those of educational institutions, manufacturing operations, retail organizations and more. RMIT University, one of the top 100 universities in the world for engineering and technology, recently upgraded its network connection to 10Gbps. Exinda customers can utilize the 10Gbps license to:

Segment recreational and business-related traffic, so IT managers can prioritize applications like Desire2Learn, and contain recreational traffic like YouTube.
Set policies and report at a group or user level, so the CEO's weekly video conference is prioritized while bandwidth hogs are identified and contained.
Accelerate ROI attainment as a result of Exinda's easy set-up and management
Create SLA definition and enforcement across the enterprise to guarantee a predictable application user-experience across the network.

"Enterprise network managers with rapidly growing network bandwidth requirements struggle to define and deliver application SLAs to the business," said Jim Metzler , founder and vice president at Ashton, Metzler & Associates. "The ability to monitor and shape traffic at the scale of 10 Gbps will help them resolve one of their biggest issues: assuring user experience."

About Exinda

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Internet Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

uSamp Taps Former Co-CEO and Founder of IAG Research, Alan Gould, to Lead the Company

newscontributor — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:53:27 +0000

uSamp, a leading provider of business insights through mobile and online survey technology, has appointed Alan Gould to the position of Chief Executive Officer.

Founders and Co-Presidents, Matt Dusigand Gregg Lavin, will continue to operate the company's core sampling business. Gould comes into this new role as an experienced industry veteran with great understanding of the business insights marketplace. In 2000, he founded IAG Research and built the company into a leading provider of engagement metrics in the television industry. He served as its co-CEO until the company was acquired by Nielsen for $250 million. Following the company's merger with Nielsen, Gould created and served as CEO of Advertiser Solutions, a business unit of the Nielsen Company.

"I am delighted to join uSamp's executive team. uSamp is one of the fastest growing companies I have ever seen in the marketing services space with a special talent for introducing great technology to its clients." said Mr. Gould. "uSamp possesses on demand access to millions of consumers around the world and combines that access with the industry's most advanced mobile research products. I look forward to working with Matt and Gregg and this special group of innovators to expand our position as a go-to provider of key business insights."

Gould recently served on the boards of VIZU, which was acquired in July 2012 by Nielsen, Harris Interactive (2011- 2012) and the READ Alliance, an organization that teaches young children to read. Since 2011, Gould has been a Venture Partner with Greycroft Partners (www.greycroft.com) a leading early stage venture capital firm with offices in Los Angeles and New York and has served as a member of uSamp's board of directors, in addition to a role as Board observer with Crowd Computing Software and Netsertive, both Greycroft portfolio companies.

"We are excited to welcome Alan to his new role as CEO. He is an industry leading product innovator for marketing data and analytics, with a history of successfully starting and leading companies to sustained growth. We are certain he will bring great energy and leadership to our already strong team," said uSamp co-founder Matt Dusig.

About uSamp

uSamp (www.uSamp.com), the fastest growing company in the Market Research Industry, is a premier provider of technology and survey respondents used to obtain consumer and business insights. uSamp's leading-mobile technology and SaaS platform transform the way companies gain intelligence to make better, faster decisions about their products and services by tapping into uSamp's 12 million member global panel of survey respondents. Through uSamp's proprietary technologies for self-serve sampling and survey authoring, companies have on-demand access to millions of profiled survey respondents. uSamp is based in Los Angeles, with five offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 200 team members worldwide. uSamp was No. 213 on the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies and is recognized on the 2011 and 2012 Forbes' America's Most Promising Company list.

The New Enterprise Standard for Regulated Content Management

newscontributor — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:30:16 +0000

NextDocs announced has the release of NextDocs 6, the latest version of its award-winning regulated content management and compliance suite.

With 5 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and two of the largest CROs relying on NextDocs solutions, the company's platform is on track to become the new industry standard for regulated content management. NextDocs 6 includes expanded capabilities to meet the demands of the highly global, mobile and collaborative life sciences operating environment.

"The life sciences industry has been undergoing a major IT platform shift, and that shift is accelerating," said Zikria Syed, Chief Executive Officer of NextDocs. "Content management and compliance are too critical to the success of life sciences companies to rely on legacy systems. The leaders in the industry are rapidly turning to regulated content management solutions based on open standards to more comprehensively address compliance, harmonize business processes and promote online collaboration."

Nearly 90 percent of digital content is unstructured according to IDC, the IT analyst firm, exposing companies to varied compliance and efficiency issues. In a separate study, nearly 37 percent of life sciences companies have reported scaling back or replacing their legacy systems, such as EMC Documentum. Nearly 65 percent of life sciences companies say they have shifted or plan to shift to Microsoft SharePoint-based content management systems. NextDocs solutions, which work alongside the dynamic SharePoint platform, enable businesses in regulated industries to comply with FDA and other health authority regulations, while also streamlining and automating business processes, improving collaboration and reducing costs. NextDocs 6 includes the following new capabilities and enhancements to its Regulatory, Clinical and Quality solutions, including SOP:

Compliance Engine: A more advanced workflow and security engine that enables sophisticated business processes and functions including controlled print, delegation, change control and periodic review.
Compliance Dashboard: Improved dashboard and search capabilities that provide a single view of document status, workflow details and the full audit trail, to help users focus on critical tasks.
Redefined Mobile Experience: An enhanced mobile experience that opens up adoption to an expanded set of business roles, both inside and outside the enterprise.
Pre-Built Deployment Configurations: Over 500 out of the box workflow configurations, based on industry-proven best practices, which enable faster and lower cost deployments.

NextDocs 6 enhancements are designed to meet the business needs of both mature companies with highly developed online regulated content management processes, as well as emerging, high-growth companies that aspire to more automated, scalable and compliant processes:

PracticingElectronic Regulated Content Management

New To Electronic Regulated Content Management

Drives the next level of value with developed regulated content management programs
Harmonizes content management across the global enterprise, connecting previously disparate silos
Provides greater process agility and over 500 workflow configurations out of the box
Enhances external collaboration with a re-defined mobile experience for remote staff and partners
Delivers proven enterprise scalability

Delivers quick start capabilities via software-as-a-service
Provides pre-configured workflows built using industry-proven practices
Offers scalability and resources to develop and grow programs
Leverages proven results from leading life sciences companies
Carries a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

"We've leveraged our experience across more than 100 customer deployments to design NextDocs 6. Now, customers can take advantage of a next generation technology platform, while also embedding industry-proven best practices," said Satwik Seshasai , Chief Technology Officer at NextDocs.

The advantages of the pre-built configurations, compliance engine and redefined mobile experience are extremely beneficial in a clinical trial management environment. NextDocs Trial Exchange solves the challenges that life sciences companies face in managing clinical documents in an increasingly global and partner-enabled environment. The solution allows remote trial site staff to contribute documents to an established eTMF work stream, receive and complete tasks generated by the sponsor, view document statuses, and retrieve documents on demand using tablets and smart phones. As a result, it can reduce the time and cost of trial management, improve collaboration with investigators, and strengthen security and compliance. The company also announced the availability of NextDocs QuickStart, an all-inclusive, cloud-based offering for companies looking to get started with electronic regulated content management. QuickStart includes the pre-configured software, implementation services and support required for a successful deployment. The solution and cloud infrastructure are pre-validated, which speeds deployment and lowers costs.

NextDocs Launches QuickStart for Emerging Growth Companies

newscontributor — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:54:24 +0000

NextDocs has announced the release of NextDocs QuickStart, an all-inclusive, cloud-based offering designed for emerging growth life sciences companies seeking to get products to market faster.

NextDocs QuickStart includes the pre-configured software, implementation, support and validation required for establishing an online regulated content management program that supports 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.

"We recognize that emerging growth companies are driving significant drug discovery innovation, and they want to get these products through trial and to market faster," said Nitin Bhatia , Vice President of Global Services at NextDocs. "To accelerate this process, they need access to the same technologies that established life sciences companies rely on; however, they often lack technical expertise, resources and budget. NextDocs QuickStart enables these companies to quickly establish the online regulated content management processes necessary to reach the next stage of growth."

QuickStart is based on the industry-proven NextDocs solution – which provides the process definition, automation and validation required for regulatory, clinical or quality management programs, including eTMF and SOP. The offering enables companies new to electronic content management to establish a compliant program quickly. QuickStart is offered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is built on the Microsoft Cloud technology platform, which delivers the industry's highest levels of reliability, performance, privacy and security. The solution and cloud infrastructure come validated and are SSAE 16 and ISO compliant, eliminating deployment hurdles and reducing costs.

"We've leveraged our experience across more than 100 industry deployments to design QuickStart," said Bhatia. "It is the industry's only offering that allows companies to get up and running quickly, and meet the demands of growth, without the disruption that comes when switching platforms."

This clear path for growth allows companies to start with a cost-effective service offering, scale by adding capabilities, as needed, and even take the solution on premise as the company grows or is acquired. QuickStart and all other NextDocs solutions share the same software code base and user interface, so costly migrations and re-training down the road are eliminated. More information about NextDocs Quick Start and NextDocs 6 is available online at www.nextdocs.com.

CONTACT:

Dan Cahill 917-617-0106 dcahill@roaringpr.com

Open-E Announces General Availability of Hyper-V Cluster Support for Its Open-E Data Storage Software V7

newscontributor — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 05:19:07 +0000

Open-E, a leading developer of innovative data storage software used for building and managing centralized storage servers, announced today the general availability of its flagship product, Open-E Data Storage Software (DSS) V7 now with Hyper-V Cluster Support.

The release of Hyper-V Cluster Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 provides optimization of virtual storage environments. The newly added feature allows Open-E customers to set up a virtualized storage environment with no single point of failure, affording the highest reliability possible with server clusters, as well as offering outstanding price performance with an Active-Active iSCSI Failover setup. Based on the Persistent Reservation Synchronization mechanism, data can be synchronized on both cluster nodes and services will not be interrupted even if a failover happens on the storage backend.

“The addition of Hyper-V Cluster Support for Windows continues our commitment in providing the SMB and SME communities with an all-in-one universal storage systems strategy that can deliver superior performance and enterprise level reliability at an attractive price point,” said Krzysztof Franek, CEO and President of Open-E. “Our all-in-one universal storage systems strategy allows businesses of all sizes to leverage off-the-shelf servers to simply build and operate the virtualized storage infrastructure they need to support their Big Data, Cloud, and other enterprise applications.”

The Hyper-V Cluster Support adds to the Active-Active Failover for iSCSI Volumes for Open-E’s DSS V7, released in July 2012. The Active-Active Failover feature eliminates any single point of failure; has a self-validation functionality that checks all critical settings on each node; provides enhanced cluster security and fully utilizes all processing power of the data storage servers, increasing their performance up to 600%.

“The continuing global sales growth that we are seeing for our Open-E DSS V7, now with Hyper-V Cluster Support, is a testament of our ever-increasing market adoption for our storage software solution,” added Franek. “Additionally, we have added to our US staff to meet the ongoing demand. We will continue to drive innovation and support our reseller partners while further establishing our technological leadership in providing the best-in-class storage software solutions to our continually growing multi-national clientele.”

About Open-E

Open-E, Inc. is a pioneering leader and developer of IP-based storage management software. The Open-E DSS V7 and Open-E DSS V7 Lite line of products are aimed at the SMB and SME markets. Open-E DSS V7 is a robust, award-winning enterprise storage application which offers excellent compatibility with industry standards (vast variety of supported hardware), and is the easiest to use and manage. Additionally, it is one of the most stable solutions on the market and an undisputed price performance leader. Open-E has over 27,000 world-wide installations in Fortune 500 organizations in over 100 countries for over a decade and has received numerous industry awards and recognition from PC Professional, Tom’s Hardware, Storage Awards, PC Pro and more. Thanks to its reputation, experience and business reliability, Open-E has become the technological partner of choice for industry-leading IT companies such as Citrix, Intel, LSI, VMware, and Adaptec. For further information about Open-E, its products and partners, visit http://www.open-e.com/.

Press Contacts

Vera Neumeyer Open-E, Inc. Office: +49 (89) 800777 18 Fax: +49 (89) 800777 17 E-mail: vera.neumeyer@open-e.com Curtis Chan Cognitive Impact Office: +1 714.447.4993 Fax: +1 714.447.6020 E-mail: curtis@cognitiveimpact.com

Paragon Solutions Releases NextDocs Migration Solution for Life Sciences

newscontributor — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:41:59 +0000

Paragon Solutions, an advisory consulting and systems integration firm, announced the release of an enterprise content management (ECM) migration adaptor for the migration of regulated content from legacy content sources to the NextDocs platform as an extension of its proven Regulated Content Migration solution.

Certified by NextDocs, a global leader in providing Microsoft SharePoint-based compliance solutions to life sciences organizations, the solution was designed to meet the challenges of migrating content in a format that meets industry and regulatory standards and complies with the NextDocs platform.

“With the release of this adaptor and application of our best practices methodologies, Paragon can assist life sciences organizations in successfully migrating content from many different legacy platforms into NextDocs to achieve NextDocs compliant documents,” said Steve Zemanick, migration center of excellence lead for Paragon’s Enterprise Content Management practice.

“With the increase in customer demand for content migrations into NextDocs based systems, we have teamed up with our global partner Paragon to offer a robust migration solution that reduces implementation risk and delivers high quality to NextDocs customers,” said Nitin Bhatia, vice president, NextDocs Global Services.

Paragon’s adaptor, which is based on fme AG’s migration-center toolset, provides an easy-to-use interface for building migration mappings and establishing data transformation rules. The migration framework uses both NextDocs and SharePoint APIs, and supports features of the two applications such as document versions, standard and custom content types and attributes. While documents will be compliant with the NextDocs platform, complete control over enabling and retaining established compliance features including watermarks, signatures and status, etc. is maintained. Paragon’s Migration COE’s methodology and toolset defines an overall approach for the migration of regulated and non-regulated documents, metadata and compliance elements. The collection of best practices, templates and processes included in the methodology serve as a guide to conduct planning, deliverables, resource allocation, and overall management for migration projects to ensure that migrations are conducted with very high quality, minimal risk, and the least possible impact to the business. Paragon will be on hand to showcase its showcase its Microsoft SharePoint capabilities and solutions at the ShareFEST conference on April 25-26 at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Philadelphia, PA. To learn about the conference, go to http://www.sharefestconference.com.

About NextDocs

NextDocs is the global leader in providing compliance software solutions including quality management software, regulatory document management, and clinical portals. NextDocs solutions enable businesses in regulated industries to achieve compliance with FDA and other agencies while automating processes, improving efficiency, and dramatically reducing costs. NextDocs’ customers include pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, medical device companies, and CROs. For more information on NextDocs Corporation and its software solutions, visit www.nextdocs.com.

About Paragon

Paragon Solutions is an advisory consulting and systems integration firm that specializes in enterprise information management to help clients leverage information assets for better business results. The company does this through its industry practices, solution accelerators and specialized technology competencies that help clients achieve operational efficiency, business scalability and regulatory compliance. Paragon works with businesses that are focused in a few key industries—communications, financial services, healthcare, insurance and life sciences. The industry-focused practices work with Paragon’s competency groups to address today’s client concerns in Process Optimization, Information Management and Information Insight. For more information, please visit the Paragon website at www.consultparagon.com, or call 1.800.462.5582.

Contacts

Paragon Solutions Erik Raper, 908-653-3016 eraper@consultparagon.com

Xtium Now an SAP-Certified Provider of Hosting and Cloud Services

newscontributor — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:16:24 +0000

Xtium, Inc., a leading enterprise software and solutions company providing managed cloud hosting, online backup and virtual disaster recovery services, has announced it is now an SAP-certified provider of hosting and cloud services for SAP® solutions.

Xtium earned certification as a provider of hosting and cloud services after meeting rigorous requirements of its ability to deliver on-demand hosting services utilizing virtualization and cloud technologies.

“Xtium is thrilled to have been certified by SAP as a provider of hosting and cloud services,” said Colleen Cody, head of enterprise operations, Xtium. “Most of our customers that utilize Xtium to host their SAP instances come through our partnerships with system integrators, such as YASH Technologies. We highly value these partnerships and are working towards adding more partnerships this year, so it was important for us to achieve these certifications.”

Xtium offers complete hosting packages for SAP business applications and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform. The certifications are significant for customers that want to ensure high-quality, sustainable and cost-effective operation of their SAP solutions.

“Our hosting solution allows customers to bring their own SAP application teams, and Xtium provides the flexible infrastructure to support those applications, which are all governed by the certifications set forth in the audit,” said Cody. “We have resources in place to make changes quickly, allowing customers to be more agile and gain operational efficiency.”

To receive SAP certification as a provider of hosting services, Xtium passed a detailed certification process to demonstrate its delivery capabilities for operating SAP solutions. The audit also analyzed many aspects of Xtium’s service offerings, such as the number of SAP systems that are currently hosted and the company’s experience deploying SAP solutions in the cloud. In addition to this, the data center facilities were also evaluated for infrastructure redundancy and fail-safe testing. To achieve certification as an SAP-certified provider of cloud services, Xtium’s cloud delivery platform underwent review by SAP to validate the operational integration of its cloud-computing platform with supported SAP applications. The audit also included technical reviews of the physical and logical security processes supporting those cloud services.

About Xtium

Xtium is a leading enterprise software and solutions company innovating managed cloud hosting, online backup and virtual disaster recovery services. We offer companies the most secure virtual private cloud experiences with improved application performance across the network. Our architecture is flexible, allowing customers to remain in control. We are the only enterprise service company certified to deliver VMware® and Riverbed® technologies. To learn more, please visit http://www.xtium.com. ### SAP, SAP NetWeaver and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.

AtTask Announces New Product Release to Drive Enterprise Productivity

newscontributor — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:37:51 +0000

Today's enterprise teams struggle with fragmented systems and tools, inconsistent processes, and limited visibility.

This results in silos of information, disconnection from the strategic direction of the company, and no justification of time and work. AtTask built its newest product release, available today, with innovation focused on driving productivity, insight, and collaboration for today's enterprise teams. The newest product release further separates AtTask from traditional project management vendors by solving enterprise team challenges.

"Enterprise teams today are failing due to the challenges of collaborating, tracking, and reporting on enterprise work," said Eric Morgan , AtTask CEO. "We're excited to roll out the latest version of AtTask that addresses the challenges of today's enterprises better than any other product on the market."

With this latest release, AtTask Enterprise Work Cloud continues to meet the needs of the entire enterprise.

Designed for enterprise work – AtTask made the navigation paths more intuitive, designed for every player on a team, not just for one person in the back office.
Centralized work and collaboration – unlike traditional project management solutions that just manage projects, AtTask centralizes collaboration while enabling users to manage all types of work – from ad hoc requests to structured, repeatable work.
Increased productivity – leveraging a next-generation social platform featuring innovations such as comprehensive in-line editing, document collaboration, and rapid report building, workers can spend more time being productive and less time managing their work.
Designed for all roles - AtTask extends a role-based user experience for every member of the team, not just project managers.
Streamlined international collaboration – AtTask supports global enterprises by providing more than 160 currencies, and 8 languages, streamlining the work of enterprise teams.

"AtTask has become the hub of information for the company," said Steve Malchow , Vice President of Operations, Engineering, and Sourcing, Trek Bicycle Corporation.

The new AtTask also includes:

Seamless connections with online document management solutions, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and Google Docs,
Enterprise-grade platform to meet demanding security and compliance requirements, including enterprise-grade encryption at rest
Enhanced reporting experience for all roles, including executive visibility into work with the new iPad View app
Integration with Outlook enables users to easily track and make work requests via email and then manage and collaborate on that work without ever leaving the comfort of Outlook.

"We've seen usage by our customers increase by 400% and project manager usage increase by 500% through our past enhancements," continued Morgan. "That increase in adoption drives the value of AtTask. Usability leads to visibility because the data is in the system, and now you have actionable data. We're excited to see similar increases in usage with this release."

Unlike traditional project management tools, AtTask is:

Robust, yet easy to use – many task management tools are so simple that they don't deliver any value; the AtTask user experience is world class, while delivering visibility into the entire lifecycle of work.
Powerful, built for enterprise teams - many tools are so complex that only a highly trained "project scientist" could use them; AtTask is built for the needs of enterprise teams.

To learn more about how AtTask drives productivity for enterprise teams, visit: www.attask.com.

Additional Resources:

About AtTask

Contact:

Shelbi Gomez shelbigomez@attask.com 801-477-9813

Mashery Sale Looks Promising for First Round, Formative, OpenView, Others

Jonathan Crowe — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:02:36 +0000

In what appears to be a win for several venture firms, API management company Mashery has agreed to sell itself to Intel, as first reported by Read Write Web and subsequently confirmed by other media outlets.

The sales price was not disclosed, but TechCrunch is reporting that a “source” says Intel will pay “more than $180 million.” RWW speculated that Intel would pay in the range of $120 million to $180 million. If the price is north of $100 million, then the sale will produce a good outcome for Mashery’s investors. The company, founded in 2006, has raised $32.45 million from .406 Ventures, Cisco Systems, First Round Capital, Formative Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners and SoftTech VC, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). Mashery’s most recent round was in May 2012, when it raised $10 million at an undisclosed valuation from lead investor OpenView and Cisco, First Round, Formative and .406, Thomson Reuters reports. About one year earlier, OpenView led an $11 million round with a post-money valuation of $50.96 million, according to Thomson Reuters. The other participants in the round were Cisco, First Round, Formative and .406. First Round, SoftTech and Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, seeded Mashery with an undisclosed amount in June 2006, then First Round invested $700,000 in a Series A in January 2007, according to Thomson Reuters. OpenView founder Scott Maxwell and Formative Ventures co-founder Clint Chao comprise half of Mashery’s board of directors.

About Mashery

Mashery, the world’s leading provider of API Management technology and services, helps securely power 62,000 apps for more than 175 top brands—including USA TODAY, Comcast, Dun & Bradstreet, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Aetna, CapitalOne and Expedia. Only Mashery offers enterprises a PCI-DSS Compliant API Management platform to build API-powered platforms for opening new distribution channels, speeding time-to-market, and spurring innovation. Mashery focuses on API success, from crafting platform strategy and setting business objectives, to managing API delivery and facilitating relationships with a network of 200,000 developers. Mashery was founded in 2006.

Spredfast Ranked Highest Social Relationship Platform for Strategy and Customer Satisfaction

Megan McNeill — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:05:22 +0000

AUSTIN, Texas, April 16, 2013 -- Spredfast, the leading independent social marketing software provider, today announced that the Spredfast Social Media Management platform received the top score for Strategy as well as for Measurement and Reporting in "The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013" report by Forrester Research, Inc. Spredfast was among the select companies Forrester invited to participate in the independent report, which evaluated eight Social Relationship Platform (SRP) products across 49 comprehensive criteria, such as vendors' current offering, strategy and market presence. According to the report, "social relationship platforms are technologies that help marketers publish content to third-party social networks as well as monitor, moderate, and respond to customer posts on social sites." "Spredfast boasts satisfied customers," stated the recently published report. "Clients were most pleased with Spredfast's measurement and reporting capabilities. And its current offering is solid: The platform helps clients monitor posts on a number of sites; it leverages Facebook's post-targeting features; and its tool is available as an iPhone app." Spredfast was the only Social Relationship Provider to earn the highest score possible (five) for customer satisfaction in this evaluation. Forrester Research recognized the company as being the strongest in Strategy, which comprised of criteria including vision and focus, product strategy, services offerings and customer satisfaction. More specifically, the report based Strategy on "the strength, experience, and vision of each company's executive team" as well as "each vendor's product development road map and what professional services and strategic services it offers and collected information on client satisfaction." "At ARAMARK, we have 300 people managing more than 400 social accounts across the diverse set of locations where we provide services," said Tom Carusona , senior director, digital & social at ARAMARK. "Spredfast has been an integral partner to us in bringing both efficiency and organization to our social programs at the corporate level, and its team has been committed to providing support and guidance throughout our journey in becoming a social business." "As an expected channel for communications between consumers and businesses, social is now commanding dedicated and sizable resources from companies," said Rod Favaron , CEO of Spredfast. "As a result, senior executives are demanding visibility into the impact social is delivering across the organization. Spredfast's mission is to be a trusted partner by helping our customers leverage social business connections to achieve great business results. Being recognized by Forrester Research as having a happy customer base is, in our opinion, proof that we consistently deliver real business value and we're 100% focused on helping enterprise brands do social right." About Spredfast Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social media management software that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Jason's Deli, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, Coty Beauty, HomeAway and WCG. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com. Media Contact: Brittany Edwards Spredfast pr@spredfast.com (512) 359-6055 SOURCE: Spredfast RELATED LINKS http://www.spredfast.com

Athenahealth Selects Mashery to Advance Openness and Innovation in Health Care

newscontributor — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:34:37 +0000

Athenahealth, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATHN), a leading provider of cloud-based services for electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and care coordination, announced the Company is working with Mashery to provide new web-services-based APIs (application programming interfaces) for the health care IT developer community.

These new offerings strengthen partner access to athenahealth’s More Disruption Please (MDP) program, an initiative that brings together entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, developers, academics, and others who believe in breeding innovation and stoking disruption as a means to overcome the staid and broken processes within health care.

“Mashery has years of experience helping its health care customers achieve tangible API program success—such as the 20 app prototypes built at the Health 2.0 Code-a-thon we hosted last October, where developers used data from fitness monitors, the FDA and insurance providers in apps that encourage ongoing healthy behaviors.”

Through its work with Mashery, the world’s leading provider of API management technology and services, athenahealth is unleashing turn-key connectivity to its cloud-based platform of HIT services and to its existing network of about 40,000 providers nationwide. This massive, open API initiative offers innovators an onramp to develop best-of-breed, HIPAA-compliant health care applications that can be easily introduced and integrated within health care provider workflows.

“With Mashery, we are yet again putting a stake in the cloud; we’re lowering the point of entry for the best and brightest across the technology community to plug into our network, to engage our captive audience of tens of thousands of providers, and to innovate on their behalf. Come! Help us disrupt and improve health care,” said Jonathan Bush, CEO and chairman, athenahealth. “athenahealth is building a cloud-based, information backbone—similar to what Amazon.com is for consumers, our platform will serve as a one-stop shop for providers seeking solutions to help them meet clinical and business goals. Unlike traditional HIT vendors that operate in closed silos and are unwilling to connect beyond their existing client base, we are all about openness.”

Kyle Armbrester, director of Business Development and head of More Disruption Please at athenahealth, added: “We are modernizing health care IT in a big way with Mashery by streamlining connectivity to our platform, and allowing the developer community to plug in and innovate. We’re providing the data and knowledge from our cloud-based network, a captive audience for developers to innovate for, and an online sandbox to do it all in. The bottom line is that there’s not enough innovation in health care; by lowering the point of entry for the development community, we’re hoping they’ll be enticed to create solutions for a cause that impacts us all—our health care.”

“We’re eager to pair our working knowledge of the current health care app transformation with athenahealth’s platform vision,” said Oren Michels, CEO and co-founder of Mashery. “Mashery has years of experience helping its health care customers achieve tangible API program success—such as the 20 app prototypes built at the Health 2.0 Code-a-thon we hosted last October, where developers used data from fitness monitors, the FDA and insurance providers in apps that encourage ongoing healthy behaviors.”

More Disruption Please (MDP) is athenahealth’s business development program; it is aimed at launching a massive surge of disruptive innovation in health care for the overall advancement in the way patient care is coordinated, delivered, and reimbursed. The MDP advantage is that qualified, high-quality health care innovators can gain access to athenahealth’s growing cloud-based network of about 40,000 providers. Through the MDP program, athenahealth will continue to introduce new services and accelerate the introduction of high-value innovation via the cloud. Those interested in learning about MDP and partnership opportunities, or alerts for when our online health care marketplace will be available, please visit www.athenahealth.com/disruption.

About athenahealth, Inc.

athenahealth is a leading provider of cloud-based services for EHR, practice management, and care coordination. athenahealth’s mission is to be caregivers’ most trusted service, helping them do well doing the right thing. For more information, please visitwww.athenahealth.com or call 888-652-8200.

About Mashery

Contacts

athenahealth, Inc. (Media) Holly Spring, 617-402-1631 hspring@athenahealth.com or athenahealth, Inc. (Investors) Dana Quattrochi, 617-402-1329 investorrelations@athenahealth.com

REVOLVEclothing.com Boosts Conversion Rates and Average Order Value with Monetate’s Visual Site Search and Product Recommendations

newscontributor — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:50:39 +0000

Today at the Monetate Agility Summit, REVOLVEclothing.com, a contemporary fashion site for men and women, shared its experiences using Monetate's online merchandising products to deploy personalized product recommendations and visual site search on REVOLVEclothing.com.

"Monetate's data-driven framework helped us better understand our customers and tailor the site in a wide range of creative ways to address individual customer's preferences," said Kobie Fuller , chief marketing officer at REVOLVEclothing. "Visual site search lets our customers explore relevant products visually in the search drop-down box, making the shopping experience more convenient and intuitive. Text-only search options can't match the visual experience and are not as effective in driving sales."

Increased Conversion Rates and Average Order Values

The video case study was presented to Summit attendees to illustrate the tremendous value REVOLVEclothing has realized through the addition of personalized product recommendations and visual site search. The video revealed how these website enhancements enabled REVOLVEclothing to improve the overall online experience for their customers, and increase conversion rates and average order value.

"We've seen a five percent conversion lift and increased average order value by almost seven percent," said Fuller.

Visual site search and product recommendations are features of Merchandiser, part of Monetate's digital marketing platform, which allows leading brands to deliver rich shopping experiences across the entire website and enables the website respond to individual shopper activity. Merchandiser also features dynamic badging, which can be deployed without making any website changes.

About the Monetate Agility Summit

The third annual Agility Summit (#agilitysummit) is taking place this week at The Westin in Philadelphia. Conference attendees include online marketing professionals from over 100 leading retail, hospitality, travel and financial services brands, who are responsible for developing digital customer experience strategies. The summit provides attendees the opportunity to hear from top marketers on how to unlock industry best practices for generating revenue lift, lowering customer acquisition costs and creating higher customer lifetime value through the use of optimized personal experiences.

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage big data to create more personalized and engaging online customer experiences. By providing more relevant web interactions, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits. Monetate drives billions of dollars of revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority and PETCO. The company's solutions and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility. Leading marketers rely on Monetate's digital marketing platform to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimization campaigns compared to industry averages. Monetate solutions include advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams. For more information, visit http://monetate.com/ or follow us on Twitter@Monetate.

Open-E to Showcase Open-E DSS V7 Storage Server Innovations at Intel® Solutions Summit

newscontributor — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:43:15 +0000

Open-E, an Intel® Premier Elite Partner and a leading developer of innovative data storage software used for building and managing centralized storage servers, announced today it will introduce Open-E Data Storage Software (DSS) V7 coming soon functionalities, Hyper-V Cluster Support and Multiple Storage Server Manager (MSSM) for simplified central management of all storage resources, to premier resellers and distributors at the Intel Solutions Summit (ISS) EMEA in Dublin, Ireland.

Open-E DSS V7 with Active-Active iSCSI Failover enables channel partners using Open-E certified Intel platforms to drive new levels of scalability, performance, and ease of management for their SMB and SME customers. Open-E can be found at ISS in Booth 40 from April 10-12 at The Conference Centre Dublin.

“2013 is proving to be an excellent year for Open-E, and we are excited to continue our decade long relationship as an Intel Solutions partner by equipping their leading resellers and systems integrators with data storage systems that provide real value for their customers and real profit for their business,” said Krzysztof Franek, CEO and president of Open-E. “Open-E DSS V7 with Active-Active iSCSI Failover accelerates the effectiveness of data storage servers sold to a customer, increasing their performance up to 600% and enabling full utilization of their server and storage capacity. Now that is a true win-win.”

Open-E DSS V7 provides a stable and robust application for Intel storage server platforms that is simple to manage, compatible with industry standards, and is the leader in price performance. Open-E’s presentation at ISS includes:

Active-Active Failover for iSCSI Volumes

Eliminates single point of failure Self-validation of system; checks all critical settings on each node Enhanced cluster security configuring; as many auxiliary paths as needed Fully utilizes all processing power

Hyper-V Cluster Support

Full support with Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 Optimized for virtual environments Outstanding price performance ratio

Open-E Multiple Storage Server Manager (MSSM)

Centralized management tool for Open-E DSS V7 Single dashboard for multiple servers Simplified access and process management

Concluded Franek, “ISS provides a unique opportunity for a leading storage application like Open-E DSS V7 to arm Intel channel partners and systems integrators with the ability to expand their solution delivery with NAS filers, iSCSI storage, storage backup, CCTV storage, HA storage clusters, 'Big Data' storage, cloud storage, and virtual storage. Intel Solution partners wanting to deliver leading price-performance systems to their customers and getting a leg up on their competition are invited to come by the Open-E Booth 40 at ISS and meet with me and my team.”

About Open-E

Press Contacts

Vera Neumeyer Open-E, Inc. Office: +49 (89) 800777 18 Fax: +49 (89) 800777 17 E-mail: vera.neumeyer@open-e.com Buzz Walker Cognitive Impact Office: +1 714.447.4993 Fax: +1 714.447.6020 E-mail: buzz@cognitiveimpact.com

Skytap Experts to Present at Upcoming SharePoint Event, Leading Development and Testing Conferences

newscontributor — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:33:09 +0000

Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, has announced that the company will be discussing enterprise cloud computing trends and showcasing its award-winning software at a number of upcoming industry events, including Camp IT, SharePointlandia, STAREAST, and IBM Innovate.

Skytap experts will be on hand to provide live demonstrations of Skytap Cloud, including how the software is used by enterprise customers for development and testing, software demonstrations and evaluations, and virtual training environments.

Camp IT - Cloud Computing Strategies - The Next Generation

What: Choosing Public vs. Private vs. Hybrid Cloud Computing When: Thurs., April 11 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. CT Where: Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, IL Who: Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing & business development, Skytap Description: After a company has made the decision to adopt a cloud computing initiative within their organization, the next step is to evaluate the various options for service: public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud? In this session, attendees will learn about current trends in the enterprise cloud industry, the various differences between the cloud options, cloud solution requirements, and how to best integrate your cloud solution with your existing infrastructure.

SharePointlandia

What: SharePoint in the Cloud: How to Easily Create Cloud Based SharePoint Development and Test Work Flows When: Sat., April 20 from 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. PT Where: Eliot Center, Portland, OR, room B304 Who: George Stamos, cloud solutions architect, Skytap Description: SharePoint developers, testers and architects know that time spent on provisioning servers, building virtual machines from scratch, and rewriting applications can be debilitating when trying to meet deadlines. Using cloud-based SharePoint environments removes IT burdens so you can focus on what you do best: developing, testing, and delivering SharePoint solutions. In this session, attendees will learn how to create virtual SharePoint Farms to collaborate on documents, build complex development and testing environments in the cloud, and leverage these cloud-based SharePoint farms for demo/training environments.

STAREAST

When: Sun., April 28 to Fri., May 3 Where: Rosen Shingle Creek, Orlando, FL, Booth # 4 Description: STAREAST is a premier software testing conference that brings the most up-to-date information, tools, and technology available in the industry. STAREAST provides innovative ideas that will help users and companies become a leader in testing, analysis and review. Conference attendees are encouraged to visit Skytap at booth #4 for a demonstration of how Skytap Cloud accelerates testing cycles and enables customers to ship better software through more rapid defect resolution and global collaboration for teams.

IBM Innovate

When: Sun., June 2 to Thurs., June 6 Where: Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel, Orlando, FL, Booth # E114 Description: IBM Innovate is the premier networking and educational conference for IT and engineering professionals that are engaged in all aspects of product development and software delivery. With top-notch keynotes, over 450 breakout sessions, labs, certifications and our biggest exhibit hall ever, Innovate will provide the tools, insights and networking opportunities you need to deliver innovative products and services, faster than your competition, with lower costs and reduced risk. Visit booth #E114 for a demonstration of how Skytap can enable development and test teams to use the skills and continuous integration workflows that they are used to with RTC, while reaping the benefits of Skytap Cloud: fast, self-service, on-demand provisioning of complex environments that includes hybrid cloud architectures.

About Skytap, Inc.

Contact:

Lindsey Bradshaw Barokas PR for Skytap Email Contact 206-264-8220

Intronis Partner Program Earns 5-Star Rating From CRN Magazine

newscontributor — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 04:29:23 +0000

Intronis, Inc., provider of world-class cloud backup solutions for the IT channel, today announced it has been named to CRN's 2013 Partner Program Guide and awarded an elite 5-Star Partner rating for its focus on delivering channel enablement and success to its managed service provider (MSP) partners.

The CRN 5-Star Rating and Partner Program Guide is the definitive listing of manufacturers and software publishers that deliver products and derive sales through the IT channel. Intronis sells exclusively through the MSP community and is recognized as one of the IT industry's most friendly channel vendors and one of the coolest cloud storage vendors. In 2012, Intronis formalized its onboarding process for new partners and invested in more support resources for existing partners. These efforts led to stronger business relationships with Intronis' MSP partners and greater success co-marketing and selling Intronis' cloud backup. Additionally, the cloud backup leader spent a tremendous amount of time in the field with its partners collaboratively selling Intronis and attended several industry events to engage with MSP partners face-to-face. Intronis also strengthened its alliances with MSP industry experts to bring more business-minded sales and marketing-specific education, training and collateral to its channel partners.

"One of Intronis' top priorities and clear differentiators is our focus on, and investment in, partner enablement," says Rob Merklinger, vice president of sales at Intronis. "As a company, we achieved more than 40 percent year-over-year growth last year, and that success was directly tied to the growing success of our MSP partners. We're thrilled to be recognized byCRN for providing our channel partners with a 5-Star Partner program and will continue to expand and evolve our partner resources to meet the needs of our MSP partners."

The 2013 Partner Program Guide is now featured on CRN.com and the 5-Star Partners listing is also highlighted in the March 2013 issue of CRN. Intronis' listing can be found on the CRNwebsite. To learn, see and hear more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on Facebook and Twitter, and read the Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery Blog.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery is a world-class cloud backup solution for the IT channel. Intronis provides the industry's easiest-to-use secure data solution for offsite and local backup, which generates a monthly recurring revenue stream to add to your business. Intronis offers the best, deepest Exchange, SQL backup on the market, supports virtualized environments with native VMware backup and is integrated to major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. Partners receive expert customer support from our U.S.-based team. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs, and the company has been named Best Revenue Generator seven times and Best Customer Support three times by members of ASCII. www.intronis.com.

Press contact:

Marie Rourke WhiteFox Marketing (for Intronis) Email Contact 714-292-2199

Monetate Launches ActionBuilder: A New Way for Marketers to Create Personalized Customer Experiences in Minutes

newscontributor — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:29:01 +0000

Monetate, a leading technology solution provider that allows online marketers to leverage Big Data to create personalized online customer experiences, has announced the release of ActionBuilder, a new Monetate core feature that gives marketers the power to create targeted campaigns in minutes, on any part of the website.

CafePress Inc., The World's Customization Engine™, used ActionBuilder to customize its website around the NCAA tournament.

"The beauty of ActionBuilder is that we can take a campaign idea and execute it almost instantly, anywhere on the website, without coding," said Wanchen Tsai , manager, business intelligence and analytics at CafePress. "Recently, we created a targeted banner campaign based on the geographies of teams in the NCAA tournament, so that visitors coming in from Louisville, for example, were not presented with a rival team's gear. This was a time-sensitive campaign, but with ActionBuilder, we deployed it successfully within minutes - something that would have ordinarily taken significantly longer to accomplish."

An advanced visual editor, ActionBuilder makes it simple for marketers to modify any part of their website, preview changes in real time, and then immediately apply the experience to specific customer segments. Once created, those actions are reusable and can be applied to completely different campaigns. This means that marketers using ActionBuilder gain control of the customer experience, allowing them to bypass backend systems to dynamically change the web experience for specified visitors.

"ActionBuilder gives marketers even more speed and control when it comes to personalizing the web experience for their customers," said Bruce Ernst , vice president of product management at Monetate. "It gives brands the power to target, deploy and test campaigns anywhere on the website within minutes, which is a critical capability for marketers in today's constantly evolving customer-centric environment."

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage Big Data to create more personalized and engaging online customer experiences. By providing more relevant web interactions, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits. Monetate drives billions of dollars of revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority and PETCO. The company's solutions and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility. Leading marketers rely on Monetate's cloud-based browser solutions to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimization campaigns compared to industry averages. Monetate solutions include advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams.

Acronis Delivers Reliable Cloud Data Protection to Small Office and Home Office Users

newscontributor — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:38:36 +0000

Acronis today ushered in a new era of data protection and business continuity for small office and home office (SOHO) users through the release of Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup.

Acronis' new SOHO cloud solution protects against downtime in ways that neither traditional backup nor cloud backup services can. It provides small business owners with the same protection that was, until now, only available to enterprises, in an exceptionally easy-to-use and affordable solution. Acronis has harnessed the power of innovative "hybrid cloud" technology in a manner that makes it extremely simple to use. By following Acronis' three-click 3-2-1 backup strategy, users get the benefits of both local and cloud backup.

"Many small businesses and home office users we speak to have limited data protection and disaster recovery capabilities," said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery, IDC. "Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup offers customers a full-featured cloud backup solution providing secure off-site data protection."

Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup is built on proven cloud backup technology from Acronis, designed with the specific needs and requirements of SOHO businesses in mind. With just three clicks, users can easily, quickly and securely back up files and critical data locally and to Acronis cloud storage where it is constantly available and accessible. Users can also leverage system-image backup technology for faster disaster recovery, and perform server restore within minutes to any hardware using Acronis® Universal Restore™.

"Small business owners rely on their computers and mobile devices, and can't afford downtime or data loss," said Dmitri Joukovski, senior vice president, product management, Acronis. "We provide SOHO users with a secure hybrid cloud solution, a reliable alternative to new-to-market or public cloud solutions, helping to ensure business continuity and secure data protection. Our solution is enterprise-grade, yet extremely easy to use, and is based on proven technology that millions of customers trust."

Acronis Small Office: Server Cloud Backup is available in a variety of subscription packages, giving SOHO users the flexibility to purchase the storage space they need, within their budget. Packages start at $499 for a one-year subscription, which includes 350 GB of Acronis cloud storage, and scale up to a three-year subscription plan with one TB of cloud storage. View the full range of subscription plans, or start a free trial now.

About Acronis

Contact Information

Meredith L. Eaton March Communications Tel: +1 617-960-9877 Email: acronis@marchpr.com

Monetate Customer Summit Focuses on Best Practices for Creating Relevant and Dynamic Online Customer Experiences

newscontributor — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:55:48 +0000

Monetate, a leading technology solution provider that allows online marketers to leverage Big Data to create personalized online customer experiences, has announced the final speaking agenda for the third annual Agility Summit (#agilitysummit), which takes place on April 10-12, 2013 at The Westin in Philadelphia.

Online marketing professionals from over 100 leading retail, hospitality, travel and financial services brands, who are responsible for developing digital customer experience strategies, have already registered to attend the conference. To review the full Agility Summit 2013 agenda, or to register for the conference, please visit: the Agility Summit website. In addition to Monetate executives, the Agility Summit has a marquee roster of speakers which includes:

Alex Miller , Vice President, eCommerce, QVC – "QVC Integrates the Customer Experience in a Multi-Screen World "
Ron Rogowski , Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research – "Understanding & Meeting the Needs of Today's Customers"
Ken Seiff , Executive Vice President, Direct and Omni Channel , Brooks Brothers – "Making the Web Personal"
Mitch Joel , President, Twist Image – "CTL ALT DLT: How to Reboot Your Business in a Connected World"
Bryan Eisenberg , Online Marketing Pioneer and Best-Selling Author – "Inside Out: The New Style of Website Optimization"
Tyron Anderson , Vice President of Solutions Engineering & Consulting, BlueKai – "Turning Next Level Data Integration Into Action"
Dr. Peter Fader , Professor of Marketing, Co-Director of Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative – "Establishing Competitive Advantage Through Customer Centricity"
Robert Gilbreath , Vice President, eCommerce - Marketing and Analytics Operations, Calendars.com, and Ryan Dahlstrom , Staff Manager - Interactive Marketing, Windstream – "Customers in Context: Being Relevant Throughout the Customer Life Cycle"
Tim Washer , Vice President, Ridiculous Media, LLC – "Better Marriage Through Big Data"

"The Agility Summit will help attendees to put a plan in place to know their customers, and take action," said Bruce Ernst , vice president of product management at Monetate. "The summit will feature speakers who will challenge the attendees to look at their businesses in new ways, and create customer-centric online experiences that strengthen relationships and boost profits. I'm excited to be part of an event where people will walk away and feel that they've gathered the insights to take action as soon as they return to the office."

About Monetate

Central Desktop Strengthens Position in Marketers’ Ecosystem with Creation of Industry Advisory Board

newscontributor — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:51:16 +0000

Central Desktop, provider of the leading cloud-based collaboration platform for marketers, established a marketing and advertising industry board of advisors to bring further expertise to Central Desktop’s strategic planning, product, corporate development and partnering initiatives.

Central Desktop welcomes the following members to its newly created advisory board:

Carol Meyers, chief marketing officer of IT security risk management solutions leader Rapid7, is an accomplished marketing and sales leader who has delivered more than $1.5B in market value for investors through three IPOs. Meyers’ 20 years of experience includes the CMO role at Rapid7, LogMeIn and Unica Corporation, where she played a pivotal role in growing the company's revenue to over $100M and establishing the new category of marketing automation software. Meyers currently serves on the advisory boards of SocialRep, Unitrends and WordStream in addition to Central Desktop.

Jerry Rios, senior vice president and chief technology officer of reputable full-service advertising agency GSD&M, is a results-oriented technology and operations executive with proven success in creating, implementing and managing enterprise technology solutions. Under Rios’ leadership, GSD&M’s information technology team has been recognized as Computerworld Honors Program Laureate recipients for the visionary application of information technology to promote positive social, economic and educational change. Rios started his 28-year tenure at the agency as a creative intern and has held several positions in the agency, including media research analyst, director of IT operations and senior vice president. During his tenure, he has had the opportunity to work on technology solutions that have supported the branding and marketing efforts of major clients such as AT&T, BMW, Goodyear, John Deere, L.L. Bean, PGA Tour, Popeyes, Southwest Airlines, U.S. Air Force, Walgreens and Walmart.

Jim Kreller, vice president of sales of BrightTag, is a seasoned sales and channel development executive focused on social business transformation, leveraging marketer collaboration technologies, partner optimization and ecosystem building. Kreller’s 15 years of leadership experience includes roles as vice president of sales and business development for leading social business consultancy Dachis Group and vice president of channels for ExactTarget where he oversaw the development of a partner ecosystem that drives over $50M of revenue for the publicly traded marketing software company.

“Given Central Desktop’s accelerated momentum with marketers and creative agencies, the unique insights and experience that Carol, Jerry and Jim bring to the table will be tremendously helpful to our continued growth in this space,” said Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop.

“Our advisory board is a critical component in guiding our strategy and ensuring sharp focus on delivering value to our customers by helping them work together in ways they never imagined possible. Carol, Jerry and Jim all bring an important breadth and depth of experience in different areas of working with marketers on solving their day-to-day challenges. I can’t wait to see all that we will accomplish in the coming year with their guidance.”

About Central Desktop

Central Desktop helps people work together in ways they never imagined possible. Our SocialBridge online collaboration platform connects people and information in the cloud, making it possible to share files, combine knowledge, inspire ideas, manage projects and more. Central Desktop serves more than half a million users worldwide. Key Central Desktop customers include CBS, MLB.com, Harvard University, the Humane Society of the United States, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Javelin Marketing Group, Upshot, Engauge, WD-40 and Workday. Founded in 2005, Central Desktop is a privately-held company with headquarters in Pasadena, California. For more information, visit http://www.centraldesktop.com.

Intronis Announces New CEO

newscontributor — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:46:38 +0000

Intronis, Inc., provider of world-class cloud backup solutions for the IT channel, and its Board of Directors are pleased to announce that Rick Faulk has joined the company as CEO and will serve on the company's board effective immediately.

Faulk is a results-driven chief executive with a proven career in the IT industry and IT channel specifically. He comes to Intronis with more than 30 years of extensive leadership experience in technology sales, marketing and operations, and has in-depth understanding of how to build and execute a best practices software as a service (SaaS) delivery model. Faulk specializes in accelerating growth for software businesses at various stages of the corporate lifecycle, from start-ups to $500M public companies.

"We're pleased to announce Rick's appointment and have him take the helm during this important time in the company's history," says George Roberts, Intronis board member and venture partner with OpenView Venture Partners. "Under Rick's leadership and vision, Intronis will accelerate its growth strategy and continue to deliver the IT channel's best-performing cloud-based backup and recovery solutions."

Faulk's career highlights include serving as the recent President and CEO of Landslide Technologies, the provider of Landslide CRM, a top-ranked SaaS-based customer relationship management solution. After the sale of Landslide to j2 Global in 2011, Faulk became the General Manager of Cloud Services for Sales and Marketing at j2. Previously, he was President and CEO of Mzinga, a leading provider of business social software solutions. During Faulk's tenure, both companies were repositioned to attain significant growth and earned prominent industry recognitions, and in addition secured new capital to fund acquisitions. From 2001 to 2005, Faulk served as CEO of Intranets.com and was credited with the fast-growth turnaround and sale of the SaaS collaboration service to WebEx Communications in 2005. At WebEx, Rick was named Chief Marketing Officer and President WebEx Small Business. He also served on the senior management team during the high-profile acquisition of WebEx by Cisco.

"Rick is a business-minded IT executive who is driven to succeed by every measure and inspires greatness from his team and the company stakeholders," says Jay Bolgatz, VP of Engineering and former interim CEO, Intronis. "Given his impressive record and background in sales and marketing, the team is thrilled to have Rick on board and work together to deliver even more value and innovation to our channel partners."

"The cloud backup market is reaching a pivotal point in its maturation cycle, which makes it an exciting time to join Intronis and use my experience to help the team build a differentiated go-to-market strategy for the company and our channel partners," says Faulk. "I am looking forward to building on our successes to make Intronis the clear market leader."

To learn, see and hear more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on Facebook and Twitter, and read the Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery Blog.

About Intronis

Press contact:

Marie Rourke WhiteFox Marketing (for Intronis) Email Contact 714-292-2199

Balihoo and CMO Council Speaking at ad:tech San Francisco

newscontributor — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:42:07 +0000

Balihoo (www.balihoo.com), the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs, today announced that Shane Vaughan, CMO for Balihoo, and Liz Miller, Vice President for the CMO Council, will be part of the “Fresh Tactics for Finding & Reaching Your Audience” panel at ad:tech San Francisco.

This session takes a look at emerging ad platforms, new tools and methods for creating audience segments, as well as strategies for reaching customers across multiple devices. According to the recent “Brand Automation for Local Activation” report from the CMO Council and Balihoo, many companies are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of local channel and field sales partners, and are looking to maximize the impact of their national campaigns by using local marketing tactics and digital media.

“The CMO Council research has some startling findings that show why local marketing is broken for many national brands, and Balihoo is honored to be taking the stage at ad:tech to share ways to help marketers more effectively reach local audiences,” said Shane Vaughan CMO for Balihoo. We look forward to a great discussion on media strategy with some of the leading minds in the industry.”

ad:tech is a digital marketing and technology conference and exposition that provides advertising, media, marketing and technology professionals with the tools and techniques needed to succeed in a constantly changing and increasingly digital world. Who: Shane Vaughan, CMO for Balihoo, and Liz Miller, Vice President for the CMO Council What: Media Strategy: Fresh Tactics for Finding & Reaching Your Audience To download the CMO Council Report, “Brand Automation for Local Activation–Connecting Customer Engagement into Measurable Local Strategies,” click here.

When/Where:

ad:tech San Francisco, April 9^th – 10^th, Moscone Center West, San Francisco, CA Vaughan and Miller will speak at 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, April 9^th Shane Vaughan will be available for press interviews. For media inquiries, please contact: Tom Francoeur by email at tom.francoeur@emanatepr.com, or by phone at 617-474-1405.

About Balihoo

Balihoo is the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs. By automating local marketing, Balihoo gives national brands unprecedented control over local marketing execution and the ability to control the customer experience closer to the point of purchase. Additional information about Balihoo is available at www.balihoo.com.

Contacts

Emanate for Balihoo Tom Francoeur, 617-474-1405 tom.francoeur@emanatepr.com

New AtTask Solution Gives Outlook Users the Power of Enterprise Work Management

newscontributor — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:30:15 +0000

Email sucks the life and productivity out of enterprise workers.

It is a chaotic, disconnected communication silo that results in lost messages, forgotten documents, unmet work requests, and an unending conveyor belt of busy work. Email is a significant drain on time and resources, particularly considering that 100 emails will occupy more than half of an enterprise workers day[1]. This significantly limits the time enterprise workers have to actually do their work.

"Email was built as a communication tool, not as a collaboration and work management tool," said Eric Morgan, CEO of AtTask. "Most enterprise teams live in email hell because of how difficult it is to track work requests they receive or send. They are effectively using email as a workflow and accountability tool for which it was never intended."

With the release of the new Outlook integration, the AtTask Enterprise Work Cloud makes it easy for enterprise teams to make Outlook a more productive work management environment. This results in:

Work gets tracked, not lost – Work doesn't get buried in the email garbage dump.
Work gets done, not delayed – Work commitments are delivered on time.
Collaboration hub, not silos – Collaboration occurs in the context of the work.
Work bliss, not email hell – Email volume decreases as work activity increases.

The AtTask integration for Outlook offers today's enterprise worker workday bliss, as they can now easily track and make work requests via email and then manage and collaborate on that work without ever leaving the comfort of Outlook.

Request Work From Others with "Send & Request" – The typical 'Send and Forget' approach requires that you search your Sent folder to remember what you have asked others to do and then send out multiple emails to find out the status. Instead, AtTask provides centralized work request tracking and collaboration directly from emails and allows you to send a request for work directly from the "New Request" button in the Outlook ribbon.
Drag & Drop Emails to Convert to Work – Instead of work requests living in multiple places, including buried deep within inboxes, AtTask provides a centralized queue and work list to evaluate, prioritize, and delegate work. Users can easily drag and drop emails to convert to a work request that retains email details, including attachments.
One Click to Collaborate in the Context of Work – Instead of searching email to track down multiple documents and conversation threads, AtTask is a single, central place where all work can be managed, including social collaboration, work progress, risks, time tracking, documents, digital proofing, and approvals.

"AtTask is focused on improving enterprise worker productivity, and now we have the ability to greatly reduce email chaos," continued Morgan. "AtTask Enterprise Work Cloud makes it easy for our clients to manage all types of work while improving collaboration and visibility. No longer do they need to risk the email black hole to ensure effective execution of work."

To see a demo of how AtTask for Outlook can make your email and overall work management more productive, visithttp://www.attask.com/outlook/.

Additional Resources:

Learn more about how the AtTask integration with Outlook improves productivity and visibility: http://www.attask.com/wp-content/attask/data-sheet-outlook.pdf
Watch how AtTask for Outlook works: http://www.attask.com/outlook/
Learn more about AtTask's integrations that improve workflow: http://www.attask.com/product/integrations

About AtTask

Contact:

Shelbi Gomez shelbigomez@attask.com 801-477-9813

Interwork Technologies Launches Exinda’s WAN Optimization & Network Control Solutions in North America

newscontributor — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:18:20 +0000

Interwork Technologies, Inc. (http://www.interwork.com), a North American specialty distributor of Security, Information Management, and Communications solutions, has announced a strategic agreement with Exinda, Inc. (http://www.exinda.com), a leading WAN Optimization and Network Control solutions company.

“Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions combined with Interwork’s security channel business practice presents a compelling value offering to our resellers,” said Joe Graci, President and General Manager at Interwork Technologies Inc. “We are excited to offer such strong solutions to our reseller partners that are enterprise quality, yet attractively priced for the mid-market. Our partners are increasingly concerned about providing robust security solutions without compromising network speed, ease of management, and quality of service.”

Exinda offers WAN Optimization, voice quality management and granular bandwidth usage reporting. Exinda's WAN Optimization 2.0 is about assuring a reliable user experience with market leading innovative solutions.

"We are very pleased with our strategic partnership with Interwork Technologies” says Kevin Kirksey, Exinda’s VP of Sales. “Through joint efforts, Exinda will be able to expand its reach in the North American region. Interwork’s partners and customers have a clear need for an integrated suite of WAN Optimization and Network Control solutions.”

In the coming months, Exinda and Interwork will coordinate and execute a joint go to market strategy to enlist new resellers to resell and deploy Exinda's, WAN Optimization technology for customers throughout North America. Part of this program will include local campaigns and events for resellers seeking new, innovative technology solutions to offer their customers.

About Interwork Technologies Inc.

Interwork Technologies Inc. is a North American value-added specialty distributor of security, information management, and communications solutions, established in 1991 with field sales resources in both Canada and US. Interwork helps resellers and vendors to develop new business opportunities that will help them to grow into new markets. Interwork also serves an extensive partner network of resellers and solution providers as an advisor in emerging technologies. For more information, visit http://www.interwork.com.

About Exinda.

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Network Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

Press Contacts:

Daniel Palmer Marketing Manager Interwork Technologies Inc. +1 (800) 461-8649 x4268 danielp(at)interwork(dot)com

The One Vital Skill Every Entrepreneur Needs

Polina — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:25:38 +0000

Top Item

Build the Board Your Company Deserves

In an ideal world, every board of directors would be a high-performance team capably built and managed to give companies every advantage they need to thrive. Of course, in the real world, boards are often assembled and run much more haphazardly, and can sometimes provide as many problems as solutions. OpenView’s latest eBook tackles that issue head-on, providing CEOs with a clear path to building and managing a highly effective, value-adding board that gives companies an unbeatable edge. Download a free copy of Building a High-Impact Board of Directors: A Guide for Expansion-Stage CEOs.

Latest from the OpenView Team

 Your Pre-Pre-IPO Checklist: It’s Never Too Early to Prepare

As a startup or even an expansion-stage company, you have got many, many steps to take before you can even begin to consider the details of your IPO. But just because those conversations are far off in the future, there is no reason you can’t start preparing for them right now. OpenView Venture Partner Firas Raouf lists 10 ways to get yourself in great shape early on for your eventual IPO.

Location, Location, Location: Does It Really Matter to a VC?

If your company isn’t located in a tech hotspot like Silicon Valley, Boston, or New York should you be worried about your likelihood of securing an investment? OpenView Research Analyst Kim Reisman offers an inside look into a venture capitalist’s investment criteria, and explains that while location does often play a significant role in making an investment decision, it might not be in quite the way that you think.

What Really Matters for Women in Tech: Hotness!

In case you missed it, this week Complex Magazine decided to make a lasting contribution to the serious discussion of gender bias in the tech industry by publishing a list of the “40 (Let’s take a guess: smartest? Nope. Most successful or innovative? Wrong again.) Hottest Women in Tech.” OpenView Marketing Coordinator Megan McNeill adds her own take on the tasteless list and the outcry that it has generated, and asks is this really as far as we’ve come?

3 Lessons from the Walmart Approach to Customer Satisfaction

You don’t grow to become the world’s largest retailer without knowing how to make customers happy. At Walmart, measuring, assessing, and improving customer satisfaction is something of an obsession, and OpenView Market Research Associate Sudip Verma identifies three lessons from Walmart’s approach you can utilize to make your own organization more customer focused.

Top Ideas from the Industry

Three Words to Close More Sales

Tired of going round and round with prospects, doing the same dance again and again and again? Of course you are. Everyone is, including your prospects. So what can you do to not only break the cycle but land more sales? In this guest post, inside sales expert Mike Brooks says you can change it all with one question that will tell you whether a deal is going to happen or not.

Learn from the Pros: How to Make a Viral Video

What is the fastest way to get everyone talking about your company? A viral video, of course. But competition is fierce in the YouTube galaxy and people aren’t going to spend time watching just any old clip you throw together. How do you make sure your video is the one filling inboxes and Twitter feeds? The creative minds behind this year’s B2B Oscar-winning “Sh*t Entrepreneurs Say” sat down with OpenView to offer insights on how to create a video that will have everyone talking.

The One Vital Skill Every Entrepreneur Needs

Of course you need a great product in order to become a truly successful company. But if you can’t communicate why your company and product are so valuable, you’ll never reach your ceiling. Andrew Follett, whose company Demo Duck helps businesses define who they are and what they do with highly successful explainer videos, explains why learning how to boil down the essence of your company into a short, inspiring story is a one of the most important and impactful things you can do.

 Don’t Settle for the Usual Suspects: Find Out Who Your Users Really Are

You may know your product inside and out, but it’s how your users interact with it that truly matters. In order to give them a successful user experience you need to develop your product based on their needs, and that means finding out exactly who they really are, not who you want them to be. User experience expert Kyrie Robinson offers tips for creating accurate, detailed user personas that are the key to better design and happier customers.

Project Lead The Way Chooses Canvas by Instructure for its Learning Platform

newscontributor — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:44:10 +0000

Project Lead The Way has chosen to use Canvas by Instructure as its learning platform to deliver its Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) curriculum.

Today PLTW is the leader in providing STEM education to middle and high schools within the U.S. More than 10,500 teachers from 4,700 schools have been trained in teaching PLTW curriculum.

"What we discovered in Canvas is more than a system. We discovered a company that is interested in growing with us," said Dr. Vince Bertram , president and CEO of Project Lead The Way. "Canvas will allow us to provide our curriculum anytime, anywhere."

PLTW is making improvements in its information technology infrastructure to better serve its network of schools, teachers, and students. Previously, PLTW provided written documents that teachers would download to teach the STEM courses. Now the learning activities are embedded directly into Canvas, from videos to group exercises because the Canvas platform is flexible and allows the teacher to define the learning experience.

"The Canvas platform is the exact right matchup for Project Lead The Way," said Josh Coates , CEO at Instructure. "The innovation in our platform, the openness of it, the flexibility of it - it's a perfect marriage with the type of content that Project Lead The Way has developed and is continuing to develop."

PLTW plans to roll out Canvas this summer. More than 50 school districts and 350 universities and colleges already use Canvas to deliver curriculum to students. To keep learning about Canvas, visit www.instructure.com.

About Instructure:

Instructure is a technology company committed to improving education. We provide instructors and students modern tools and resources to empower the learning experience. Instructure offers Canvas – the open, easy-to-use, cloud-native learning management system. We also provide Canvas Network, an index of open, online courses from Ivy Leagues to community colleges.

Contact:

Devin Knighton , Director of Public Relations (801) 722-8187 | devin@instructure.com Twitter: @devinknighton | www.instructure.com

Portfolio Cocktail Reception

Megan McNeill — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:26:47 +0000

OpenView is hosting a cocktail reception for its portfolio companies!

Wednesday, April 10th from 6-8pm

OpenView Studio | 303 Congress Street | 3rd Floor | Boston, MA | 02210

Please see map at right.

OpenView will be hosting a casual cocktail reception for its portfolio companies in advance of the 2013 CFO Forum. Members of both the portfolio and OpenView teams will be in attendance to network and enjoy some top notch food and beverages.

Check out more photos from our events:

Flickr | Facebook

We’re excited to see our portfolio company team members there!

OpenView Publishes eBook on Building High-Impact Boards of Directors

newscontributor — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:45:37 +0000

OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support, announced today the release of a new eBook entitled, “Building a High-Impact Board of Directors: A Guide for Expansion-Stage CEOs.”

Targeted at the CEOs of expansion-stage technology companies, the eBook explains how to assemble and manage a successful board of directors.

“No matter how experienced CEOs may be, many struggle with board management," explained Firas Raouf, Venture Partner at OpenView. “They are unsure when and how frequently to communicate with their board, how involved their board members should be, or even how the board can provide the greatest value. This eBook outlines best practices that will help them to work with their boards more effectively.”

The eBook reflects OpenView’s considerable experience working with entrepreneurs to navigate the challenges of building and managing the kind of board of directors that companies need at the expansion stage. It is intended to help CEOs:

Understand the value that an effective board of directors can provide
Assess whether or not it is time to change their current board
Recruit and assemble a high-performance team
Establish a clear management rhythm to engage your board effectively

In addition to sharing OpenView’s ideas, the report is supplemented with the results of a recent OpenView survey of more than 80 board members and CEOs at companies. The objective of that survey was to get their views on things like the value that a great board of directors can bring, the ways in which bad boards can cause the most harm, and the most influential factors in determining whether or not a board is successful. The results of the survey are shared throughout this eBook.

“After reading this eBook, CEOs will be better informed about what to expect of their boards and what they need to do to build a high-performance team that can truly add value to their company,” said Raouf. “It’s not easy creating a successful board of directors and, in fact, few companies ever do. Our new eBook will go a long way toward helping those CEOs do just that.”

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $440 million in total capital under management.

Exinda Enables High-Speed Connectivity at 35,000 Feet with Satcom Direct

newscontributor — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:34:50 +0000

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and network control solutions, today announced that Satcom Direct, a developer of satellite communications solutions for corporate and military aircraft, has selected the Exinda Mobile platform to be integrated into its first hardware product, the Satcom Direct Router (SDR).

Acting as a Wi-Fi access point on an airplane, the SDR will utilize the Exinda Mobile platform to improve the consistency and response time of Internet applications, giving passengers an improved data user experience while on-board the aircraft.

"Executives, government officials and business professionals continue to spend a large amount of time in the air, so the need to constantly be connected is greater than ever. To fulfill that 'office in the sky' mindset, we looked for platforms that could give customers the same Internet user experience in flight as they would see in their offices," said Curt Gray , Vice President of Satcom Technologies for Satcom Direct. "By utilizing the Exinda Mobile platform in the SDR, we are able to provide customers with a greatly improved in-flight Internet experience."

The Exinda Mobile platform is the only solution currently available that offers the ability to apply collaborative caching and incorporates traffic acceleration based on the user's location. It delivers improved application performance without extra hardware or network reconfiguration, often leading to lower capital costs for customers. With the Exinda Mobile platform, customers can experience faster applications, improved remote collaboration, massive bandwidth savings, high-speed connectivity and a reliable experience for users, wherever they're located.

"Exinda is honored that Satcom Direct has selected the Exinda Mobile platform to help their customers achieve the best user experience possible while in the air. As the mobile workforce continues to grow, it's imperative that customers are able to bypass traditional bandwidth and speed limitations and instead, access their network and critical applications without hassle," said Kevin Kirksey , Vice President of Sales, North America for Exinda. "The Exinda Mobile platform goes above traditional approaches and enables the SDR to offer high-speed connectivity while incorporating traffic acceleration and collaborative caching."

About Exinda

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Network Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

About Satcom Direct

Satcom Direct is the leading provider of satellite voice and broadband data solutions for flight deck and cabin communications serving business, military, government, and heads of state aircraft. The company is a premier Inmarsat Distribution Partner, Iridium Service Partner, and ViaSat Yonder's preferred reseller, supporting more than ninety percent of all corporate flight departments worldwide. Satcom Direct continues to advance its services through mobile applications and value adds – from flight deck datalink to cabin communications – making Satcom Direct the leader in aeronautical satcom service. For more information regarding Satcom Direct, visit www.satcomdirect.com, e-mail sales@satcomdirect.com, or call +1.321.777.3000. To view Satcom Direct's portable satellite communication equipment and services, including satellite phones and BGAN units, visit www.satcomstore.com, e-mail mobileops@satcomdirect.com, or call +1.321.777.0771.

Acronis Announces mobilEcho Integration With MobileIron AppConnect

newscontributor — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:29:18 +0000

With personal mobile devices fast becoming the first point of daily collaboration for many users, Acronis has announced that it is part of the MobileIron® AppConnect ecosystem in an effort to further the accessibility, availability and protection of critical data on such mobile devices.

Acronis® mobilEcho is now integrated with MobileIron® AppConnect to help mobility IT managers better manage the growing number of mobile apps end users are adopting for greater productivity. By integrating the secure mobile app and device management of MobileIron with secure mobile file management of mobilEcho, mobility IT groups are able to strengthen and standardize mobile app security and compliance, and configure apps from a central location. For users who have multiple business apps, this reduces risk as they no longer need to manage multiple apps or remember multiple passwords. AppConnect allows the end user to have direct, secure access to the familiar, easy-to-use mobilEcho app through which IT can enforce the data-security and data-access rights required by their organization.

"Mobile devices have had a profound impact on the corporate world, having become virtually ubiquitous across all industries and roles -- sales, marketing, finance, legal, customer support, R&D, you name it," commented Anders Lofgren, Director of Mobility Solutions at Acronis. "However, security, compliance and management are but a few of the questions that enterprises and IT are challenged to address. The integration of mobilEcho and AppConnect will negate many of these concerns allowing IT organizations to safely embrace a BYOD policy and improve their mobile strategy overall."

"The app explosion has moved to the enterprise, and our customers are eager to give their users great apps as part of their Mobile First initiatives," said Ojas Rege, VP Strategy, MobileIron. "mobilEcho is a perfect example of an app that enables a user to be productive from anywhere and from any device, and it is a great addition to the MobileIron AppConnect ecosystem."

mobilEcho enables IT organizations to provide iOS™ or Android™ mobile device users with the identical secure and managed access to files and content on enterprise file servers, SharePoint® and NAS storage, that they experience from their laptop or desktop. This includes the ability to edit, annotate and collaborate on any documents. Access rights are integrated with Active Directory® to ease management and support compliance. MobileIron, the leader in security and management for mobile apps, documents, and devices, provides its AppConnect technology to third party mobile app developers. AppConnect apps have been enabled with auto-configuration, data containerization, and secure tunneling to protect corporate data to give Mobile IT teams the policy and security controls they need.

About MobileIron

The leader in security and management for mobile apps, documents, and devices, MobileIron's mission is to enable global companies to become Mobile First organizations, embracing mobility as their primary IT platform in order to transform their businesses and increase their competitiveness. Recognized by IDC as the fastest growing mobile enterprise management vendor in the world, MobileIron provides the scalable architecture, rapid innovation, and best practices for global companies to transform into Mobile First organizations. Leading global companies use MobileIron as the foundation for their Mobile First initiatives, including 7 of the 10 top pharmaceutical companies, 5 of the 10 top banks, 8 of the 10 top automotive manufacturers, 3 of the 5 top retailers, 4 of the 5 top aerospace and defense companies, and half of the 10 top law firms. For more information, please visit www.mobileiron.com.

About Acronis

Media Contacts:

MobileIron: Clarissa Horowitz MobileIron clarissa@mobileiron.com 415-608-6825 Acronis: Meredith L. Eaton March Communications Tel: +1 617-960-9877 Email: acronis@marchpr.com

Fluid, Inc. Signs On as Monetate Certified Partner

newscontributor — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 04:42:15 +0000

Fluid, Inc., a digital shopping innovator, announced that it is a certified partner of Monetate, a leading technology solution that allows online marketers to leverage Big Data to create personalized online customer experiences.

“Utilizing the Monetate website personalization and testing platform will change the game when it comes to designing for brands’ and retailers’ return on investment,” said Vanessa Rumbold, executive vice president and managing director at Fluid. “With the standard agency funnel process, page designs are iterated upon until they are 'perfect' and ready for launch. With Monetate, we are able to blow this process away, using a more flexible approach that emphasizes ongoing personalization and optimization through continuous updates.”

Retailers are constantly looking for ways to analyze the customer experience on their ecommerce websites. A/B and MVT tests can be cumbersome, complicated and costly to setup, execute and analyze. Through the partnership, Fluid will provide the strategic, design, and analysis services needed to get the most out of the platform, using Monetate's powerful, business-user friendly tools. This will free up Fluid’s clients to focus on executing the recommended outcomes of the testing, rather than dealing with the testing itself.

"We're very excited to have Fluid using Monetate to provide its clients with highly personalized and optimized digital experiences,” said Colton Perry, vice president of partnerships at Monetate. “With Monetate, Fluid will be able to apply and deliver marketing strategies and tactics to targeted audience segments on an unprecedented scale. We're thrilled to be working with a partner who shares our vision for creating dynamic web experiences for the consumer.”

About Fluid

Fluid is focused on shopping in today’s digital world. Our work for world-class retailers like The North Face, Clorox, Gymboree, Benefit Cosmetics, JELD-WEN, and Brooks Brothers brings their brands to life, making the digital shopping experience fun, vivid, intuitive and social. Brands and retailers tap our combination of strategic consulting, custom design and development services, and our visual merchandising suite to engage, convert and retain consumers with unique digital experiences. Fluid is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Chicago. For more information, visithttp://www.fluid.com (agency services) or http://www.fluidretail.com (on-demand visual merchandising suite) and follow us on Twitter @Fluid or Facebook/FluidInc.

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage big data to create more personalized and engaging online customer experiences. By providing more relevant web interactions, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits. Monetate drives billions of dollars of revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority, and PETCO. The company’s solutions and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility. Leading marketers rely on Monetate's cloud-based browser solutions to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimization campaigns compared to industry averages. Monetate solutions include advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams.

Acronis Named to CRN’s 2013 5-Star Partner Program Guide

newscontributor — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 04:37:51 +0000

Acronis announces it has been named to CRN's 2013 Partner Program Guide, and awarded a 5-Star Partner rating.

The CRN Partner Program Guide is the definitive listing of manufacturers and software publishers that service solution providers or provide products to the IT Channel. The guide recognizes those vendors who have channel programs and derive a portion of their sales through the indirect IT Channel. The 5-Star Partner Program rating recognizes an elite subset of Partner Program Guide vendors who give solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs. The Acronis Global Partner Program is a progression-based program based on two key pillars: Revenue and Product Certification. In the last 12 months, Acronis has added nearly 1000 new partners to its program in the US, and now has approximately 100 partners achieving Platinum, Gold or Silver status. Dependent on status, partners can enjoy an increasing list of benefits from no-cost evaluation units, support and training to MDF and joint business plans and marketing campaigns.

"We have seen the Acronis partner program continue to improve, and so has our mutual business," said Caroline Hinton, vice president product management, software at Insight. "With enhanced training programs, margin incentives and continued extensions of the solutions and platform, the Acronis products are relevant to more clients and more pertinent to our portfolio."

"We have concentrated on expanding our reach into the virtualization market, aggressively recruiting VMware partners to our program," commented Kim Stevens, director of channels for Acronis Americas. "Acronis has also provided partners with a broader sales opportunity, by adding a new portfolio of solutions to manage data everywhere it may be used, from desktop to tablet and smartphone. We have significantly expanded our relevance to protection of data on mobile devices, and many of our partners have also increased sales based on this new opportunity. "

"The companies listed in CRN's 2013 Partner Program Guide represent a comprehensive list of the best channel programs in the market today," said Kelley Damore, senior vice president and editorial director, for UBM Tech Channel's CRN. "The 5-star award is reserved for vendors that understand that a successful partnership does not rely solely on the technology. By offering their partners tools, education and regular updates, vendors on this list go above and beyond traditional support to ensure a mutually beneficial partnership."

Acronis currently has almost 30,000 registered partners worldwide, representing the Americas, EMEA and APAC, an increase of nearly 5,000 since the re-launch of the Partner Program in 2011. The list methodology is based on objective criteria that takes into account each vendor's investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support and communication. Vendors are assessed using information provided in their completed applications. The 2013 Partner Program Guide will be featured on CRN.com and the 5-Star Partners listing will be highlighted in the March 2013 issue of CRN.

About Acronis

Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today's complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organizations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data, and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organizations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac in the enterprise. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis. Acronis^® is a registered trademark of Acronis International GmbH. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademark rights are retained by their respective owners.

About UBM Tech Channel www.ubmchannel.com

UBM Tech Channel, a UBM company, is the premier provider of IT channel-focused events, media, research, consulting, and sales and marketing services. With over 30 years of experience and engagement, UBM Tech Channel has the unmatched channel expertise to execute integrated solutions for technology executives managing partner recruitment, enablement and go-to-market strategy in order to accelerate technology sales. To learn more about UBM Tech Channel, visit us at: www.ubmchannel.com.

UBM llc www.ubm.com

UBM llc is a leading global business media company. We inform markets and bring the world's buyers and sellers together at events, online, in print and provide them with the information they need to do business successfully. We focus on serving professional commercial communities, from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists around the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30 countries is organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to www.ubm.com

Contacts

Betzi Hanc UBM Tech Channel 508.416.1182 betzi.hanc@ubm.com Meredith Eaton March PR +1 617-960-9877 acronis@marchpr.com

Open-E Data Storage Software V7 with iSCSI Active-Active Failover Achieves 600% Improvement Over Active-Passive Failover

newscontributor — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:42:41 +0000

Open-E, a leading developer of innovative data storage software used for building and managing centralized storage servers, announced today that their recently introduced iSCSI (SAN) Active-Active Failover Cluster Feature Pack addition to their Open-E Data Storage Software (DSS) V7 has achieved up to 600% performance improvement over existing active-passive failover implementations.

The Open-E Active-Active Failover Cluster feature for iSCSI implementations is a crucial data storage functionality targeting applications in high availability, cloud storage, virtualization and business continuity environments requiring the utmost in performance and data security. The 600% performance improvement using an Active-Active, load balanced cluster topology is due to a refinement in the software’s algorithm resulting in a significant decrease in system latency and 100% utilization of a system’s storage resources. Balancing the workload not only prevents storage overload so the quality of service does not deteriorate, but also allows the system to achieve maximum performance, resulting in the cluster’s ability to process a high number of read and write operations even faster. The new addition enables users to simultaneously run volumes in the active mode on two nodes - providing high availability of data. If one node fails, the other one takes over automatically and all application services continue to run without interruption. Once the failed node is available again in the resource pool, the storage administrator can move the activity of selected volumes back to the node of choice. As a result, the Active-Active functionality dramatically improves overall cluster performance since the read, write and replication traffic can be balanced on both nodes. Open-E’s DSS V7 Active-Active Failover Cluster provides significant advantages over other competitive offerings. Specifically, these are the following:

Doubles the overall performance in most storage cluster configurations.
Eliminates any single-point-of-failure by configuring Active-Active clusters without shared (common) disks, affording higher data security in high availability environments.
Offers simplified iSCSI failover configuration with helpful status icons in Open-E DSS V7.
Provides Self-Validation of the system. Open-E DSS V7 checks all critical settings on each node, thus clusters cannot be started if they are configured wrong.
Improves cluster security, allowing to configure as many auxiliary paths as warranted, based on the number of network connections in the storage network.
Offers increased sensitivity to network failures by providing the ability to configure Ping Nodes.
Speeds up networking connectivity since I/O traffic is equally balanced on two nodes.
Fully utilizes all processing power on both cluster nodes.

Eliminates waste of hardware resources by providing more efficient storage usage.

“Other competitive offerings can give users Active-Active solutions or offer a reasonable price and configuration, but very few can deliver both at the same time,” said Krzysztof Franek, CEO and president of Open-E. “Our Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active Failover Cluster provides superior performance, security, and scalability at a fraction of the cost of alternative storage solutions. Moreover, the flexible design of Open-E DSS V7 enables organizations of all sizes to create effective iSCSI solutions that can adapt to and meet the simplest to the most complex enterprise level storage needs.”

About Open-E

Press Contacts

Company Cult(ure): Has Zappos Gone Too Far?

Polina — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:47:22 +0000

Top Item

Fulfilling a Promise: Finding Ways to Develop Stronger Relationships & Add Real Value

Some of the biggest challenges founders and managers face during their companies’ development in the expansion stage center around the need for operational knowledge and tactical expertise. When OpenView invests in a company, it makes a promise that it will provide not only funding, but help in that area, as well. The firm’s latest case study examines one of the initiatives launched to address that goal: its quarterly workshops. Learn how OpenView’s workshops help senior managers in three distinct ways and contribute to the broader mission of building great companies.

Latest from the OpenView Team

Cultural-Fit-ology: Announcing the Finalists for Best Company Culture in Tech (You Decide Who Wins)

It all comes down to this. We started with 16 of today’s top tech companies and after three rounds of head-to-head competition the field has been narrowed down to two left standing. Only one can take home bragging rights as the company with the best company culture in tech. And only you get to decide who that will be. Find out who the finalists are and cast your vote for the winner.

Hard Lessons from Groupon: The Company’s Biggest Mistake

It wasn’t so long ago that Groupon was the envy of startups everywhere, turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google while on the verge of its own remarkable IPO. Where did it go wrong? Tapping into over 25 years of experience in the industry, OpenView Venture Partner George Roberts offers his take on what doomed Groupon and how you can avoid the same mistake .

Bringing Sales into the Relationship Marketing Loop

A good relationship marketing program can improve your ability to drive awareness to, nurture, and close prospects by delivering the right content at the right time via the right channel. But as OpenView’s Ori Yankelev explains in this post, while your outbound lead generation team should be heavily utilized during that process, it is a key resource that is often overlooked.

Company Cult(ure): Has Zappos Gone Too Far?

A strong company culture is often worn as a badge of pride in the startup community, but how far should companies go to earn it? At Zappos, candidates are put through interviews dedicated entirely to assessing cultural fit and 50 percent of the review process focuses on upholding cultural ideals. Is it all too much? OpenView’s Lindsey Gurian asks whether Zappos has taken its obsession with culture over the top.

Top Ideas from the Industry

From Cinderella to #1 Seed: SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin on Keys to Scaling Up After Funding

Transitioning from the startup to the expansion stage introduces an entirely new set of challenges to a business. And while funding certainly helps in terms of adding new resources, SEOmoz Co-Founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains, there also needs to be a shift in mindset. To put it in March Madness terms the focus isn’t just on winning a single game, it’s on making a deeper run. Read on for Fishkin’s advice on expanding your team, continuing to adapt, and the shift from creating your business to running it.

Here, There, and Everywhere: Unexpected Places You’ll Find Scrum and Agile Development in 2013

As Scrum continues to grow in popularity due to its effectiveness in reducing inefficiencies and increasing productivity, it is primed to expand beyond software. But some of the industries adopting it might surprise you. Dr. Jeff Sutherland reveals new trends in agile development and explains why you will see it leaving its mark on defense contracts, lean hardware, and even schools.

Generate More Leads with the Perfect Webinar

When executed correctly, a good webinar can be a very strong lead generation tool. So how do you get started? In this short video, B2B marketing strategist Brian Carroll explains that if you have already jumped into planning the opening remarks you are off on the wrong foot. Learn why the keys to a great webinar extend beyond the content, itself.

The Answer to This Question Will Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Your Company Culture

Despite its appearance in nearly every tech company recruiting video ever made, having a ping pong table does not define your company culture. Too often, focus in put on perks and policies when culture is really about performance, argues HR blogger Kris Dunn. In this guest post, Dunn provides one question to add to your next employee survey to get at the heart at what is truly driving the culture at your company.

Acronis Customer Service Recognized in Three Categories at Prestigious National 2013 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service(SM)

newscontributor — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:31:57 +0000

Acronis is proud to announce that it has been honored in three categories at the seventh annual Stevie^®Awards for Sales & Customer Service^(SM).

Acronis was awarded Silver in Customer Service Department of the Year - Computer Software, Bronze in Customer Service Management Team of the Year and Bronze in the Contact Center of the Year (up to 100 seats) categories. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world's top sales awards, contact center awards, and customer service awards. The Stevie Awards organizes several of the world's leading business awards shows including the prestigious American Business Awards(SM) and International Business Awards(SM). More than 1,100 entries from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted to this year's competition, an increase of 10% over 2012. Finalists were determined by the average scores of 120 professionals worldwide, acting as preliminary judges. More than 100 members of eight specialized judging committees determined Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists during final judging this year.

"We work tirelessly towards providing a reliable and valuable service to our millions of customers worldwide, from the home user to the small business, right up to government and enterprise organizations," commented Ed Benack, CIO and Chief Customer Officer at Acronis. "I am very proud that our team has been recognized amongst the industry's finest customer support professionals. Our ethic is to err on the side of the customer, while providing an efficient and cost effective service to our internal and external stakeholders. It is the commitment of the entire team to continuous professional development that is the key to our ongoing success."

Entries were considered in 30 categories for customer service professionals, including Contact Center of the Year, Award for Innovation in Customer Service, and Customer Service Department of the Year; 41 categories for sales professionals, ranging from Senior Sales Executive of the Year to Sales Training or Coaching Program of the Year to Sales Department of the Year of the Year; and categories to recognize new products and services and solution providers.

"From our perspective this was the most successful Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service yet," said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards. "Not just because of the increase in the number and variety of entries, but in the extraordinary quality of the entries. Judges have told me how impressed they were with the success stories they reviewed this year. All of this year's Stevie Award winners are truly deserving."

Details about the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service and the list of Stevie winners in all categories are available atwww.StevieAwards.com/sales.

About The Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in four programs: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards atwww.StevieAwards.com. Sponsors and supporters of the 7^th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service include the Business TalkRadio Network^®,PrintingForLess.com, and ValueSelling® Associates.

About Acronis

Media Contact For Acronis:

Meredith L. Eaton March Communications Tel: +1 617-960-9877 Email: acronis@marchpr.com

NextDocs and Microsoft Mobilize Clinical Trials with Trial Exchange and Windows 8

newscontributor — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 04:24:38 +0000

NextDocs, the global leader in compliance solutions for the life sciences industry, today demonstrated how its newly launched Trial Exchange solution combined with Windows 8 addresses the critical needs of life sciences companies in securely and efficiently managing clinical trials in today's highly global and mobile operating environments.

Trial Exchange, the newest product available on the NextDocs platform, provides an easy-to-use interface for investigators and site staff to access and contribute essential documents for clinical trials. The documents and workflows can then be managed within the NextDocs eTMF solution. NextDocs Trial Exchange can be accessed through the web browser or through a native Windows 8 app. In an online demonstration, Microsoft and NextDocs showed how the combination of Trial Exchange and Windows 8addresses the need for greater mobility, security, compliance and collaboration in clinical trial management.

"We live in an ever more global, mobile and connected world that can pose many business challenges – but also presents opportunities. The native Windows 8 app for Trial Exchange allows life sciences professionals to readily access and contribute documents from any device anywhere in the world. It makes clinical trial document management solutions easy-to-use without sacrificing compliance, security or mobility," said Matt Walz , Chief Technology Officer at NextDocs.

The proliferation of mobile devices and tablets presents new compliance and security challenges for life sciences companies. Switching back and forth between unintegrated devices also tends to lower productivity and increase costs. These problems can magnify when companies start to bring external partners into the clinical trial process. Trial Exchange and Windows 8 can solve these issues. The solutions allow trial site staff to contribute documents to an established eTMF work stream, receive and complete tasks generated by the sponsor, view document statuses, and retrieve documents on demand – all within the industry standard SharePoint environment. Unlike many existing clinical portals, Trial Exchange plugs directly into the eTMF without additional routing, thus ensuring sponsor/CRO quality and document management processes in clinical site documents. The Microsoft and NextDocs demonstration is available via a webinar at www.nextdocs.com. The two companies will also demonstrate the solution live at the ShareFEST conference in Philadelphia in April 2013. To register for ShareFEST, please visit www.sharefestconference.com/2013/.

About NextDocs Corporation

NextDocs is the global leader in providing compliance software solutions including quality management software, regulatory document management, and clinical portals. NextDocs solutions enable businesses in regulated industries to achieve compliance with FDA and other agencies while automating processes, improving efficiency, and dramatically reducing costs. NextDocs' customers include pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, medical device companies, and CROs. For more information on NextDocs Corporation and its software solutions, visit www.nextdocs.com.

Contact:

Dan Cahill Roaring PR (917) 617-0106 dcahill@roaringpr.com

Monetate to Demonstrate How Retailers Can Create Personalised Customer Experiences in Real-Time at Upcoming InternetRetailing Expo

newscontributor — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:00:26 +0000

At InternetRetailing Expo, Monetate (Booth P39) will showcase how Internet retailers can drive real-time, customer-centric experiences to generate improved customer engagement and higher revenue.

The Monetate team will demonstrate its cloud-based optimisation solutions that make it easy to personalise, merchandise and test every aspect of the digital customer journey. At the conference, attendees can discover how retailers use Monetate solutions to create a web experience that reacts intelligently to a customer based on data such as purchase history, device, location, in-session browsing behaviour and more. Monetate will also show how brands can easily deploy A/B/n and multivariate testing, and quickly optimise their websites to provide the experience that works best for different customer segments.

"Monetate powers retailers to take a customer-centric approach to ecommerce, leveraging what has been learned about customers through data and using that information to present the optimal online experience", said Blair Lyon , vice president of marketing, Monetate. "By drawing insights from historical and real-time data, marketers can anticipate and react to consumer preferences and situations and deliver a fantastic online experience for the customer."

The InternetRetailing Expo will be held in Birmingham, UK, 21-22 March 2013. To request a meeting with Monetate at InternetRetailing, contact mharris@monetate.com.

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage Big Data to create more personalised and engaging online customer experiences. By providing a more relevant web experience, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits. Monetate drives significant revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority and PETCO. The company's solutions and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility. Leading marketers rely on Monetate's cloud-based browser technology to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimisation campaigns compared to industry averages. The Monetate technology includes advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams.

VersionOne Extends Platform with OpsHub Integration Manager

newscontributor — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:25:48 +0000

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, has announced a strategic partnership with OpsHub, a provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) migration and integration solutions.

Leveraging OpsHub Integration Manager, VersionOne is further extending the broadest open ALM platform, providing cross-functional teams with the data and tools needed for efficient project execution and management.

"Organizations with cross-functional teams require development environments that not only provide a robust toolset, but also improve visibility and collaboration across the agile lifecycle," said Sandeep Jain , president and CEO of OpsHub. "Our partnership with VersionOne brings a single integration solution to market that meets all of these needs."

The VersionOne platform with OpsHub Integration Manager brings more than 15 additional deep ALM tool integrations into an already extensive software development ecosystem. The result is the broadest open integration platform on the market. VersionOne's highly configurable centralized management hub allows customers to operate more efficiently across functional teams by improving visibility across all systems.

"VersionOne's partnership with OpsHub reinforces the VersionOne mantra 'Agile Your Way,'" said Paul Culling , vice president of alliances at VersionOne. "The additional integrations resulting from this partnership further VersionOne's goal of helping organizations build true best-of-breed ALM platforms to fit their specific needs. As software organizations move away from single-vendor ALM stacks to best-in-class tools for each activity within the development lifecycle, VersionOne delivers an open platform that allows our customers to realize the full benefits of the agile development lifecycle. "

OpsHub Integration Manager unifies ALM systems, allowing for deep technical integration, including the ability to customize their development environment with tools that meet the needs of cross-functional teams. With this partnership, VersionOne now supports more than 45 open source and commercial integrations. Information about VersionOne's openAgile integrations and connectors, including those provided by OpsHub can be found at http://www.versionone.com/platform/.

About OpsHub

OpsHub is the leading provider of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration and migration solutions for application development organizations. OpsHub enables creation of a global ALM system by seamlessly combining individual ALM systems. OpsHub delivers on the promise of an agile and unified global ALM system, helping application development organizations achieve the benefits of agility at scale.

About VersionOne

VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools. By simplifying the planning and tracking of agile projects, we help teams deliver better software faster. Since 2002, companies such as Boeing, Cerner, Fiserv, GMAC, Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Motorola, Novell, Oracle, Qualcomm, SAP and Siemens have turned to VersionOne. Today tens of thousands of teams around the world use VersionOne.

Intronis Named to Top 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors List by CRN

newscontributor — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:31:15 +0000

Intronis, Inc., provider of world-class cloud backup solutions for the IT channel, has been named one of 2013's Top 100 Cloud Computing Vendors by CRN and recognized as one of the coolest cloud storage vendors to make the magazine's annual listing.

Featured on CRN.com, the Top 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors slideshow notes cloud as a game-changing technology that's inspiring a new wave of storage innovation and solutions built to address the business needs of small to mid-size businesses (SMB) as well as enterprise organizations. Within the online coverage, CRN recognizes Intronis for its purpose-built technology, channel-friendly business model and best practices around redundancy and data encryption.

"Cloud storage and online backup is a safety net no business should do without and a service every channel partner should offer," says Jay Bolgatz, interim CEO and VP of Engineering, Intronis. "Our cloud backup solutions are designed to complement the business model of managed service providers (MSPs) and make it easier and more profitable for them to proactively address the storage, data protection and recovery needs of today's SMBs and enterprises."

Using Intronis' cloud backup solution, MSPs can offer clients complete data protection services as part of their ongoing managed IT service agreement. Additionally, Intronischannel partners have access to a variety of business enablement resources including online training and support around how to market, sell, deploy and manage Intronis cloud backup solutions, as well as contributed and sponsored insights and collateral from managed services pioneer Gary Pica and VMware vExpert Greg Shields and others. Earlier this month, CRN recognized Intronis' Co-Founder and Vice President of Channel Development Neal Bradbury and Vice President of Sales Rob Merklinger in its annual CRNChannel Chiefs list. To learn, see and hear more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on Facebook and Twitter, and read the Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery Blog.

About Intronis

Contact Information

Marie Rourke WhiteFox Marketing (for Intronis) Email Contact 714-292-2199

OpenView Venture Partners

Outbound Lead Generation Management Workshop

Outbound Lead Generation Management Workshop

Wednesday, July 17th, 9am – 4:30pm - Thursday, July 18th, 9am – 12pm

OpenView Studios

Instructure, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and IMS Global Launch the LTI App Bounty

Instructure, maker of the Canvas learning platform, announced at the IMS Global Conference today that it is partnering with Blackboard, Desire2Learn and IMS Global Learning Consortium to encourage development of new LTI®apps for education.

The LTI App Bounty panel of judges includes:

About Instructure

About Blackboard Inc.

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Increased Enterprise Demand for Hybrid Cloud Fuels Skytap Growth

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Exinda Boosts Traffic Control to 10Gbps

Exinda Networks Inc. has released an upgraded version of its top of line network optimization appliance which can shape network traffic at up to 10 Gigabits per second.

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VersionOne Introduces Agile Portfolio Timeline and Collaboration Enhancements

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Exinda Achieves Visionary Position in 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and Network Control solutions, has announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc., as a visionary vendor in the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers.

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VersionOne Introduces Agile Portfolio Timeline and Collaboration Enhancements

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, today announced the availability of its Spring 2013 release.

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AtTask Named “Cool Vendor” in CRM Marketing Applications 2013 Report

AtTask, the only provider of Enterprise Work Management for marketing teams today announced they had been included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the Gartner Inc. report, Cool Vendors in CRM Marketing Applications, 2013.

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Exinda Extends Leadership with Integrated 10Gbps Network Shaping Solution

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and Network Control solutions, has announced that it has enhanced its network-shaping capabilities, adding a 10Gbps license to its solution for mid-market data centers.

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uSamp Taps Former Co-CEO and Founder of IAG Research, Alan Gould, to Lead the Company

uSamp, a leading provider of business insights through mobile and online survey technology, has appointed Alan Gould to the position of Chief Executive Officer.

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The New Enterprise Standard for Regulated Content Management

NextDocs announced has the release of NextDocs 6, the latest version of its award-winning regulated content management and compliance suite.

NextDocs Launches QuickStart for Emerging Growth Companies

NextDocs has announced the release of NextDocs QuickStart, an all-inclusive, cloud-based offering designed for emerging growth life sciences companies seeking to get products to market faster.

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Open-E Announces General Availability of Hyper-V Cluster Support for Its Open-E Data Storage Software V7

Open-E, a leading developer of innovative data storage software used for building and managing centralized storage servers, announced today the general availability of its flagship product, Open-E Data Storage Software (DSS) V7 now with Hyper-V Cluster Support.

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Paragon Solutions Releases NextDocs Migration Solution for Life Sciences

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Xtium Now an SAP-Certified Provider of Hosting and Cloud Services

Xtium, Inc., a leading enterprise software and solutions company providing managed cloud hosting, online backup and virtual disaster recovery services, has announced it is now an SAP-certified provider of hosting and cloud services for SAP® solutions.

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AtTask Announces New Product Release to Drive Enterprise Productivity

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Mashery Sale Looks Promising for First Round, Formative, OpenView, Others

In what appears to be a win for several venture firms, API management company Mashery has agreed to sell itself to Intel, as first reported by Read Write Web and subsequently confirmed by other media outlets.

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REVOLVEclothing.com Boosts Conversion Rates and Average Order Value with Monetate’s Visual Site Search and Product Recommendations

Today at the Monetate Agility Summit, REVOLVEclothing.com, a contemporary fashion site for men and women, shared its experiences using Monetate's online merchandising products to deploy personalized product recommendations and visual site search on REVOLVEclothing.com.

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