Acronis Boosts Business Development, Alliance Partner Teams with New Appointments

by OpenView

Disaster recovery and data protection solutions vendor, Acronis, has strengthened its business development in Australia and its alliance partnerships across the Asia Pacific region with new appointments.

Acronis’ general manager, Pacific, Karl Sice, announced the promotion of Simon Bills, a foundation member of the Acronis sales team, to the new position of Alliances Lead for APAC, responsible for managing key alliance partners, including VMware, Red Hat and Dell, and the development of programs and initiatives to grow the business.

Dean Schroder has been appointed End User Business Development Manager (BDM), for the Australia North region, responsible for originating new Acronis licence and virtualisation project business in the region, which comprises NSW north of Sydney Harbour, the ACT and Queensland.

Sice said Schroder had extensive storage market knowledge and experience gained during a 15 year career with storage vendors and systems integrators including SecureData Group, XSI Data Solutions, Quantum and Exabyte. He said Bills had been instrumental in building Acronis’ strong channel business in Australia and New Zealand, and coupled with previous APAC experience, was ideal to take up his new position within the region to foster and grow the company’s “valued partner business.”

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime.

Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow @Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis

Acronis® and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Acronis Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Contact Information

Lucy Millington
Acronis, Inc.
T: 781.782.9181
E: lucy.millington@acronis.com

Meredith Eaton
March Communications
T: 617.960.9877
E: acronis@marchpr.com

Starboard Storage Systems and Acronis Partner to Bring Optimized Storage Solutions to Small and Medium Enterprises

by OpenView

Starboard Storage Systems, a leader in Application-Crafted Storage for mixed workloads, and Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud environments, today announced a partnership that will deliver a storage platform capable of consolidating mixed workloads with backup in both physical and virtual environments.

Starboard Storage and Acronis are committed to providing customers with easy-to-use, high performance, complete business continuity solutions. Together, the solution will deliver storage, data protection and recovery that will increase performance with SSDs, consolidate mixed workloads and simplify backup across both physical and virtual environments.

The Starboard AC72 Storage System is designed to dramatically simplify managing mixed workload environments that include unstructured, virtualized and structured data. The company eliminates many storage pain points through technology that is designed for small and medium enterprises, and built from the ground up to deliver SSD acceleration tiering and dynamic storage pooling delivering twice the performance of traditional NAS and SAN systems.

“We are pleased to have Acronis as a Starboard Storage technology alliance partner, so we can jointly provide customers simple primary storage, enhanced performance, simplified backup and more reliable data protection,” stated Starboard Storage Systems Chief Marketing Officer, Karl Chen.

“In today’s world of unstructured and virtualized data hyper-growth, ensuring management simplicity, performance and data safety is of paramount and growing concern. This is a shared core value of Starboard Storage and Acronis.”

As a technology alliance partner, Acronis will provide data protection and disaster recovery via Acronis Backup & Recovery® 11 for physical and virtual environments and Acronis vmProtect™ 7 for VMware® with vCenter™ integration, VM replication and Microsoft Exchange support that provides rapid recovery times for businesses worldwide.

“When we learned that the Starboard AC72 Storage System enables the consolidation of mixed workloads and optimizes performance, we felt that our backup and data protection products were a great fit,” said Seth Goodling, Virtualization Practice Manager at Acronis. “Together we are delivering one of the highest performing, most secure, easily managed and cost effective solutions available for operating mixed workloads in both physical and virtual environments.”

On Wednesday, April 4, the companies are co-delivering a webcast titled “Cut Storage Costs by 50% and Automate Your Backup,” featuring Lee Johns, vice president of Product Management at Starboard Storage Systems, and Seth Goodling, Virtualization Practice Manager at Acronis. To register, visit: http://bit.ly/GIahIp.

For more information on Starboard Storage please contact Starboard Storage sales at sales(at)starboardstorage(dot)com or 888-734-7726.

About Starboard Storage Systems:

Starboard Storage Systems is the innovator in Application-Crafted Storage™ systems for mixed workloads. Starboard Storage tackles the toughest storage problem facing small and medium enterprise (SME) IT administrators today — managing mixed storage workloads that include unstructured, virtualized and structured data. The Starboard AC72 Storage System delivers on the promise of sophisticated yet easy-to-manage storage for mixed workload environments.

Starboard’s MAST architecture changes the price/performance equation relative to today’s SAN and NAS offerings. http://www.starboardstorage.com Follow @Starboardstorag on Twitter:http://twitter.com/starboardstorag.

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages.

For additional information, please visit http://www.acronis.com. Follow @Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis.

Central Desktop Expands Business with New Office in India

by OpenView

Central Desktop, a leading cloud-based collaboration platform company, today announced the opening of its new office in Pune, India.

The news comes on the heels of significant employee growth, increased revenue, key customer wins and industry successes in 2011. The new office represents an important international expansion, which gives the company a competitive edge in responding to market demands.

“The office addition in India is an integral part of our growth strategy,” said Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop.

“We are confident this expansion will provide Central Desktop a larger footprint to meet increased demands and new business opportunities. We will continue to focus our efforts on key areas of the company that will drive momentum forward and ensure that we remain industry leaders.”

The new office has 20 full-time employees in product management, engineering, web operations, IT and accounting. The company’s goal is to triple its existing engineering velocity by the end of the year. Dhruba Kalita, vice president of engineering and managing director of Central Desktop India, will help scale operations using his more than 20 years of experience and extensive knowledge of technology and engineering management. According to Kalita, who has successfully managed international expansions prior to Central Desktop:

“The most critical element to success is creating a unified culture across offices and encouraging strong interaction on a daily basis. Through use of our own collaboration tools, we intend to promote one company, one team and one culture with diverse groups in multiple locations.”

Teams across Central Desktop’s three office locations in Pasadena and Anaheim, California and Pune, India will be tightly integrated and work together on cross-office project teams. None of the company’s U.S. jobs will be transitioned to India; Central Desktop is still actively hiring in virtually all departments in the U.S., including engineering, web operations/IT, product management, customer experience, sales, marketing and business development.

About Central Desktop

Central Desktop is a cloud-based collaboration platform that centralizes the way people work, teams collaborate and managers lead. The company’s comprehensive online collaboration solution centralizes social and workflow tools into one access point in the cloud, streamlining processes and bringing people together to collaborate and engage. Central Desktop customers include CBS, Netflix, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, the Humane Society of the United States, Workday, Harvard University and over 500,000 users.

Founded in 2005, Central Desktop is a privately-held company with headquarters in Pasadena, California. For more information about the company, visit http://www.centraldesktop.com.

Contacts

Intersect Communications for Central Desktop
Michelle Van Jura, 646-781-9323
michelle@intersectcom.com

New ExactTarget Research Finds Nearly Half of UK Consumers Interacting with Brands on Facebook

by OpenView

A new study released today by global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget (NYSE:ET) found that nearly half of UK consumers interact with brands on Facebook and nearly a quarter of those are more likely to make a purchase from that brand.

Based on more than 1,404 consumer interviews and surveys, The Social Profile UK research report is the latest in ExactTarget’s Subscribers Fans and Followers research series to explore UK consumer behavior across email, Twitter and Facebook.

Key findings of the study include:

  • 46 percent of UK online consumers have purchased after receiving an email marketing message.
  • 45 of all UK online consumers have ‘liked’ a brand on Facebook, and 24 percent of those said they are more likely to buy from the brand after ‘liking’ the company on Facebook.
  • 7 percent of all UK consumers have followed a brand on Twitter, and 32 percent of those said they are more likely to buy from the brand after following the company on Twitter.

“UK consumers expect more from brands than ever before as they turn to email, Facebook and Twitter for exclusive content, special offers and unique experiences,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “Agile marketers who can drive interaction across online channels and build consumer engagement have a clear advantage, and our Subscribers, Fans and Followers research provides the insight they need to understand what consumers expect.”

The Social Profile UK research report is the latest research brief in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series. The research provides marketers exclusive insight into consumers’ online preferences and motivations for interacting with brands on email, Facebook and Twitter.

To download the research report and to subscribe to receive future research briefs delivered via email, click here.

The launch of the research follows Forrester Research naming ExactTarget a “consistent leader” in email marketing in “The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Vendors, Q1 2012” report. The report awarded ExactTarget’s current product offering perfect scores for its usability, triggered messaging capabilities, dynamic content, and ability to automate multichannel analytics. To download The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Vendors, Q1 2012 report, visit www.ExactTarget.com/EmailWave.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of email marketing and cross-channel interactive marketing software-as-a-service solutions that empower organizations of all sizes to communicate with their customers through email, mobile, social media and websites. ExactTarget’s powerful suite of integrated applications enable marketers to plan, automate, deliver and optimize data-driven interactive marketing and real-time communications to drive customer engagement, increase sales and improve return on marketing investment. For more information, visit www.ExactTarget.co.uk.

Contacts

for ExactTarget
Simon Bibby, +44 (0)20 7025 8204
simon.bibby@fireflycomms.com

Hyphen Technology (Pty) Ltd. Cuts Bandwidth Utilization, Reduces Cost, and Accelerates ROI Thanks to Exinda

by OpenView

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimisation solutions incorporating Unified Performance Management (UPM), together with its Platinum reseller partner, Layer 7 Networking, has enabled outsourced application service provider Hyphen Technology (Pty) Ltd. to gain granular visibility and control of its network, thereby increasing its intelligence around bandwidth utilization and capacity, leading to substantial cost savings and a return on investment in just over 2 months, as well as improved network efficiency.

Hyphen processes, tracks and reconciles 3 million financial transactions daily on behalf of large corporate clients using its hosted financial administration platform. This requires 24/7 operational infrastructure, along with the ability to monitor and control the network, whilst at the same time maintaining customer satisfaction and ensuring continuous service levels during peak traffic times. Hyphens’ customers include four major banks in South Africa, together with a number of the country’s government institutions, retail organisations, and insurance companies.

Hyphen’s deployment of an Exinda UPM solution between the company’s headquarters and data centre provides comprehensive monitoring, control and optimisation of traffic during high-volume, complex and multi-layered financial transactions. Prior to installation, Hyphen found itself constantly increasing bandwidth capacity to meet clients’ needs, thereby incurring additional cost. As a result of the Exinda solution, Hyphen’s average day-to-day bandwidth utilisation has reduced from 100 Mbps to below 10-15Mbps, peaking at up to 30-40Mbps during peak load times, a reduction of between 60% -90% in bandwidth costs.

Tabakenna Mashilwane, Chief Operating Officer at Hyphen Technology, explains, “The Exinda solution has enabled us to understand exactly what is consuming bandwidth, what we need to do to manage that consumption, pinpoint bottlenecks exactly, and remove non-critical traffic at peak times. By merely removing non-business critical traffic from the first network layer we have been able to save a significant amount of money this year alone, which results in a tremendous direct contribution to reducing the company’s cost base.”

Mashilwane continues, “The results we have seen from Exinda in the short amount of time the solution has been deployed have been significant. We are delighted with the level of service we have received from Exinda and our partner Layer 7 Networking, which has been instrumental during the initial proof of concept phase through to full installation. We are now looking to install a further two Exinda devices later this year to provide a holistic view of the entire network.”

Alan Rehbock, sales director for Sub-Saharan Africa at Exinda, says: “The business benefits we have managed to achieve for Hyphen Technology has led to a significant financial saving for the organisation and is a clear validation of our solution. We continue to see growing market demand for our technology within the region as we address many of the network performance challenges faced by organisations looking to take advantage of the business benefits offered by cloud, SaaS and real-time applications such as video.”

About Exinda®

Exinda is a proven global supplier of next generation WAN Optimisation and Application Acceleration products. The company has helped over 2,500 organisations in over 80 countries worldwide improve the end user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

About Hyphen Technology

Hyphen Technology (Pty) Limited is a subsidiary of FirstRand Investment Holdings. Driven by technology, innovation and service, Hyphen focuses on the delivery of a broad spectrum of value-add solutions within the Business-to-Business environment.

These include the majority of South Africa’s largest life assurance companies, short-term insurance companies, furniture retail groups, municipalities, certain banks and prepaid service providers. After twelve years in operation Hyphen still provides service to 98% of it’s original client base.
http://www.hyphen.co.za

Brent Rasmussen of CareerBuilder Joins Balihoo’s Board of Directors

by OpenView

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 Brent Rasmussen, President of CareerBuilder North America, has joined Balihoo’s Board of Directors.

Rasmussen is an accomplished business strategist and brings a decade of senior management experience driving innovation, expansion and ongoing revenue growth for CareerBuilder North America to his new role on Balihoo’s Board of Directors.

He will work closely with Balihoo’s senior management team and other Board of Directors members to guide the rapidly growing provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to continued growth and expansion.

“Under Brent’s leadership, CareerBuilder has become the industry leader in its category and the U.S.’s largest online job site, and we’re honored that he’ll be contributing those same skills to fuel Balihoo’s continued and future success.”

“It’s critical for any business to make a meaningful impact on the local level, and Balihoo is changing the way companies go to market and connect with consumers,” said Rasmussen. “It’s exciting to serve on the Board of a fast-growing company that is redefining local marketing for national brands.”

In his current role as President of CareerBuilder North America, Rasmussen heads the day-to-day operations of CareerBuilder.com, the U.S.’s largest online job site, and CareerBuilder Canada. He has served in key roles at CareerBuilder for a decade, helping the company secure and widen its category lead.

In his previous positions as COO and Senior Vice President of Sales, he was charged with leading all sales, customer operations, and corporate marketing functions of the company. Under Rasmussen’s direction, CareerBuilder developed a suite of cutting-edge products, diversified its sales channels and broadened its distribution network, which had a direct effect on CareerBuilder becoming the industry leader in five short years.

“Balihoo is thrilled to have an accomplished business strategist like Brent Rasmussen join our Board of Directors,” said Pete Gombert, founder and CEO of Balihoo. “Under Brent’s leadership, CareerBuilder has become the industry leader in its category and the U.S.’s largest online job site, and we’re honored that he’ll be contributing those same skills to fuel Balihoo’s continued and future success.”

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

Topaz Partners
Tom Francoeur, 781-404-2405
tfrancoeur@topazpartners.com

Drobo and Acronis Partner to Provide Storage Solutions for Small Businesses

by OpenView

Data storage specialist Drobo is teaming up with Acronis, a provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions, to deliver a backup and recovery solution for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The joint solution incorporates Drobo’s business storage arrays as well as backup and recovery solutions from Acronis.

A recent global threat awareness survey from Acronis found that businesses are struggling to maintain adequate backup and recovery provisions as their environments evolve and expand. More than half of survey respondents admitted to not backing up their virtual data as often as their data on physical machines, and nearly 60 percent are using separate solutions for their virtual and physical environments. The combined solution from Acronis and Drobo is designed to help ease the IT management burden and accelerate data recovery following an unexpected failure.

Drobo also announced the development and enhancement of lab-tested and joint-partner solutions in the form of simple “how-to” guides and online video tutorials created with industry partners including VMware, Citrix, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Veeam, Symantec, Acronis, Double-Take, Carbonite, Pogoplug and OCZ. These resources are designed to address small and midsize business (SMB) storage solution needs, including virtualization, cloud computing and data protection.

Drobo solutions include the server virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer for high-availability applications and OCZ for automated data-aware tiering of mixed workloads in virtualized environments; disaster recovery such as VMware Site Recovery Manager for leveraging vSphere replication between dissimilar storage; Double-Take Availability from Vision Solutions for physical and virtual server DR failover; and off-site file replication for unstructured data in smaller organizations leveraging Drobo Sync.

The solution set also includes cloud storage services from Amazon for leveraging the AWS Storage Gateway for automatic off-site backup to cloud, Carbonite for off-site cloud backup and Pogoplug for remote access to files and cloud backup.

In the category of data protection and backup, Drobo offers solutions featuring Veeam Backup and Replication for protecting VMware and Microsoft virtual environments, Acronis Backup and Recovery for heterogeneous backup of physical and virtual servers, and Symantec Backup Exec for extending storage for SMB backup with deduplication options.

The company said it would continue its solution development and training in the coming weeks with dedicated solutions for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vCloud and others.

For each solution, Drobo develops materials that allow customers and resellers to design their solution with need-based components, and Drobo also provides detailed instructions for sizing and implementing the solution in a validated manner. Each solution includes a 30-minute video tutorial by an expert and a detailed how-to guide providing step-by-step instructions.

According to recent cloud usage research conducted by Drobo, 96 percent of SMBs (with up to 500 employees) report they will store at least 50 percent of their data on-site for a minimum of the next three years. Factors cited included cloud performance, security and reliability concerns. Both businesses and individuals did state they want tighter and more automated integration between their on-site data and their cloud provider.

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime.

Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow @Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis

Acronis® and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Acronis Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

Contact Information

Lucy Millington
Acronis, Inc.
T: 781.782.9181
E: lucy.millington@acronis.com

Meredith Eaton
March Communications
T: 617.960.9877
E: acronis@marchpr.com

ShareFEST Blog Offers New SharePoint Resource for Life Sciences Professionals

by OpenView

ShareFEST is an established mecca for insights into SharePoint best practices in life sciences.

Today ShareFEST 2012, in conjunction with NextDocs, launched the ShareFEST blog at http://www.ShareFESTConference.com/blog, extending its commitment to bring the experience and wisdom of industry leaders to all life sciences organizations that stand to benefit from using SharePoint and related technologies.

The new ShareFEST blog aims to become a resource for industry leaders to understand how Microsoft SharePoint can help streamline processes, navigate regulatory compliance demands, and dramatically reduce costs.

“Our industry is continually evolving and many life sciences organizations are seeking more and better information on applications of Microsoft SharePoint,” said Zikria Syed, Chief Executive Officer of NextDocs.

“We marshaled experts from across the industry, including well-known professionals from our lineup of ShareFEST speakers, to offer perspective and insight into new avenues for increasing profitability and reducing time to market through SharePoint collaboration and automation.”

The ShareFEST blog will offer new tools and strategies that complement ShareFEST 2012 conference sessions and offer a taste of the wealth of information available at the conference. The blog will feature five posts at launch, written by experts including:

ShareFEST 2012 is hosted by Microsoft and NextDocs, the leading provider of SharePoint-based document and quality management software solutions for life sciences organizations. The conference will be held at the Lowes Philadelphia Hotel from April 19-20, 2012.Registration information is available on the ShareFEST website. For more information about the conference, please visitwww.ShareFESTConference.com.

About NextDocs Corporation

NextDocs is the global leader in providing Microsoft SharePoint-based compliance software solutions including quality management software, regulatory document management, and clinical portals. Our 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, bio-techs, medical device companies, and CROs. For more information on NextDocs Corporation and its software solutions visit www.nextdocs.com.

Contacts

NextDocs Press Contact:
Gregory FCA
Matt McLoughlin, 610-228-2123
Matt@GregoryFCA.com