Intronis today announced availability of Winter Release ’12, the latest version of its world-class cloud backup and recovery solution for the IT channel.

Today’s product release adds key features designed to save Intronis’ partners valuable time in the delivery of file-based cloud backup and recovery. With Winter Release ’12, Intronis debuts its all-new ConnectWise integration as well as mobile application availability for the iPhone and Android-enabled devices.

With Intronis’ debut of mobile applications, partners can check the status of their clients’ backups from any iPhone or Android-enabled device. By extending key features of Intronis’ centralized management portal to mobile applications, Intronis is delivering backup status and user contact information right to our partners’ phones, enabling them to provide proactive support wherever they are.

“Mobile apps make managing backups quick and easy,” said Carol Ferrari, vice president of marketing for Intronis. “Partners can view usage data, backup stats and client contact information even when they’re on the run.”

Intronis’ all-new integration with ConnectWise’s Professional Services Automation software makes managing backups simple and streamlined. Partners have greater flexibility and options in setting up billing for their Intronis backup solution within ConnectWise. Intronis’ notifications also automatically create ConnectWise service tickets complete with all the relevant customer information needed to take action.

Intronis is the first backup vendor to deploy an integration based on ConnectWise’s new Managed Devices API. The Managed Devices API supports a deeper integration with ConnectWise billing and configurations, increasing simplicity and ease of operation for Intronis partners.

“By being among the earliest adopters of the ConnectWise Managed Device API, Intronis demonstrates its commitment to working with third-party solutions in a proactive way that enhances the experience for the IT Nation,” said Jeannine Edwards, director, ConnectWise Community. “Implementation of the Managed Device API and other ConnectWise development tools helps Intronis better support its partners by streamlining the billing and ticketing processes to make delivering managed services easier.”

The Winter Release expands upon Intronis’ commitment to lower your Manhours per Gigabyte™, or the amount of time that’s needed for our partners to deliver cloud backup and recovery services. Deep integrations with leading PSAs and RMMs and mobile app availability will further drop Manhours per Gigabyte. Managed Service Providers can take a quick calculation of their Manhours per Gigabyte at http://www.manhourspergigabyte.com.

A webinar detailing the features and advantages of the ConnectWise integration is scheduled for Wednesday, February 29, at 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific. Register at http://tiny.cc/syztp.

Managed Service Providers and IT professionals may start a free, no obligation trial of Intronis’ cloud backup and recovery solution, and start to experience the innovation that drives down Manhours per Gigabyte. Visit http://www.intronis.com/freetrial.

Intronis’ mobile applications may be downloaded from iTunes or Android Market.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup + 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 and SQL backup on the market, U.S.-based customer support, and is also integrated to major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs and the industry spoke by awarding Intronis the 2011 Vendor of the Year from ASCII. http://www.intronis.com.

Recently the team at OpenView Labs, the strategic and operational consulting group within OpenView Venture Partners, shared a list of the top sales thought leaders for 2012.

Using marketing channel prioritization metrics, the team compiled the list of 25 of the most powerful thought leaders in the world of B2B selling, lead generation and more. The list was created to help identify the top sales minds young startup and expansion stage companies should take note of.

“We wanted to release a list to showcase the bright minds in the sales management and lead generation space. This is a great resource for senior managers and sales people alike in order to learn industry best practices to help take their teams and companies to the next level,” stated Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs.

The list of top influencers includes Greg Alexander of the Sales Benchmark Index, Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group, Jonathan Farrington of JF Corporation, Colleen Francis of Engage Selling Solutions, Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power Magazine, Lori Richardson of Score More Sales, Tibor Shanto of Renbor Sales Solutions, and many more.

“It is an honor to be on this list with such amazing, smart and successful colleagues. Thanks for this recognition and congratulations on giving sellers some focus on where to go for ideas,” commented Lori Richardson.

“An amazing group of insightful sales gurus,” added Dan Waldschmidt.

To see a list of all of the top sales influencers, please visitOpenView Labs. To learn more about how the list was compiled, read about the Labs’ prioritization scheme.

About OpenView Labs

OpenView Labs is the strategic and operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a global Venture Capital fund that invests in expansion stage technology companies. The Labs was formed to assist the management of OpenView portfolio companies build great companies by gathering, creating, storing, and disseminating best practices across all functional areas. The dedicated full-time teams, Senior Advisors, and network at OpenView Labs spend the bulk of their time working on behalf of the OpenView Venture Partner’s Portfolio companies. This work includes incubating methodologies, testing approaches, performing research projects, developing and implementing forums and workshops, gathering the best network and ideas for building great companies, and coaching the management of the portfolio companies.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus 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 with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

Kareo, Inc., the leading provider of easy and affordable cloud-based practice management and medical billing software for physicians in the United States, announced today the opening of a new sales and customer service office in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The new mid-west facility will help Kareo better serve the needs of its mid-west and east coast customers and support the growth of its simple, cloud-based technology solution for managing small doctor’s offices.

“We are excited to open our new office in Indianapolis,” says Dan Rodrigues, founder and CEO of Kareo. “We decided to open a second location to better serve the needs of our rapidly growing, national customer base.  We searched for a location positioned in the Eastern Time Zone that offered a large and rich talent pool and a favorable business environment.  Indianapolis was the best fit.”

The new office is managed by Jason McDonald, National Director of Sales for Kareo, and is located in the thriving business and tech hub known as Keystone at the Crossing, on the north side of Indianapolis.  The office opens with 15 full-time sales and customer service professionals and the company plans to add more than 50 jobs at the new facility in 2012.  The new staff will focus on sales, implementation and training of new Kareo customers.

“Nothing is more exciting to me than leading a high-performance, customer-centric team within a rapidly growing technology company that is helping to improve the healthcare system in this country,” says Jason McDonald, National Director of Sales for Kareo.  “I am thrilled to build this office and expand our team here in my hometown of Indianapolis.”

The new Indianapolis office is Kareo’s second corporate facility.  Kareo’s corporate headquarters are located in Irvine, California. Kareo will be aggressively hiring in both locations throughout 2012 in order to support the explosive growth.  Kareo is already used by more than 10,000 physicians, and the company is adding hundreds of new physicians every month.  The new jobs will be added in sales, customer service, marketing and product development.  For more information, or to apply for a job at Kareo, please visit Kareo’s jobs site at www.kareo.com/about/kareo-jobs.

About Kareo

Kareo is a leading provider of easy to use, affordable, cloud-based practice management and medical billing software to thousands of physicians and hundreds of medical billing companies.  Kareo’s user-friendly and quick-to-implement solution enables physicians to get paid faster by storing patient records, verifying insurance eligibility, submitting electronic claims to insurers, posting electronic insurance payments, billing patients, managing accounts receivable, and much more.  For more information on Kareo, please visitwww.kareo.com.

Last week we covered data from Experian that revealed the demographic profile of ‘those who pin’, and over the weekend, Monetate released a new infographic that follows on from this.

While the chart we included in our post from Ignite Social Media stopped at October 2011, we see that from that point until December, traffic increased more than fourfold.  In fact, this grew to 7.51m unique visitors in December alone according to Compete.

The amount of traffic Pinterest sent elsewhere has risen accordingly, becoming a top five referrer for several ‘specialist retailers’, according to internal data from Monetate.

Of course, it all depends on who those retailers are, which is something we’ll follow up on in the coming weeks, but this does suggest that Pinterest’s ability to send people elsewhere is growing. Particularly when you see that Experian places the site as the fifth highest traffic referrer among social networks for the week ending 26/11/11.

When you put this in the context of search, it still overshadows social networks as a driver of traffic by a long way, as shown in the stats below.

But Pinterest is young, and though at the moment is underdeveloped in terms of how brands can even use it (brands are listed as ‘people’ – and the search function isn’t the best), we’re still keeping an eye on it.

Recently Exinda, a provider of WAN optimization solutions that incorporates unified performance management, was selected by the Eira High School to help improve control and visibility across the school’s IT infrastructure.

Eira High School is located in Helsinki, Finland and the school’s Gigabit Ethernet network and 370 workstations were originally designed to serve 2,500 students. The school selected the 6760 Series WAN Optimization Appliance to prioritize applications on its network, identify problem users and accelerate WAN performance.

“We have some problematic students who prefer spending time online to have fun instead of attending classes and studying,” said Göran Strömstén, IT manager at Eira High School, in a statement. “We wanted a way to be able to identify these users immediately and to control how they used our network.”

School authorities were searching for a solution that would enable them to better analyze network utilization at the application and user level. This way, the school could optimize bandwidth for the applications and users they prioritize.

The unified performance management solution from Exinda provided Eira High School with a solution that ensures that the network is secure and available for both administrative and educational purpose. The solution also allowed the school to ensure priority bandwidth services for its VoIP system and key administrative and educational applications.

Furthermore, Exinda’s WAN optimization solution with unified performance management functionality also helped the school increase network efficiency, identify problem students who have shared passwords with unauthorized users and quickly pinpoint which user or application is exceeding the stipulated bandwidth limit.

Exinda’s appliance edge cache was easily leveraged to streamline Internet and website access for frequently used content. The cache process reduces the burden on the network because it collects all popular content streamed over the network. When the demand arises, the content is served from the cache, eliminating the need to be delivered over the network every time.

“The Exinda system gave us better visibility into our network, better control over it, and it was easier to use than the other systems we evaluated,” said Strömstén. “We have also achieved an increase in overall network efficiency, an ability to identify students who shared passwords with other unauthorized users, and the ability to see at a glance whether any user or application was using an inappropriate amount of bandwidth.”

In another recent company development, Exinda announced it has appointed Bytes Systems Integration as a national reseller in South Africa. This decision follows Exinda’s recent expansion in South Africa and the enormous customer interest that the company has received in the region.

Pete Gombert, CEO of the local marketing operations company Balihoo, discusses the need for digital and social marketing to be properly targeted.

Direct Marketing New (DMN): What does a company like Balihoo do for its clients exactly?

Pete Gombert (Gombert): We’re a software company and we do marketing on a local level. For example, Kohler sells through 850 distributors and dealers throughout the country. They use our value platform to load up templatized marketing, email templates, direct mail—there are 18 different media channels we support. Then a local affiliate can interact with the Balihoo platform. We can take a template, a local website, and instead of having to gather data from local distributors, we can pull data from various systems and marry that up with the template. The big problem that we’re solving is that national brands struggle to execute marketing with local effectiveness in a brand-consistent way. It’s about trying to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

DMN: Who are some of your clients?

Gombert: Kohler, Geico, Pearl Vision, Aflac, and we have several clients in the healthcare space. There are 30 brands now on the platform.

DMN: What are most important trends in marketing that your clients need to be aware of?

Gombert: Digital is definitely the push forward. Traditional or analog tactics are not as effective as they once were. Local businesses struggle to adopt digital tactics. What our brands are looking for us to help them with is really a couple different things [including] managing a local presence—being found when someone’s looking for you. Those things are really important. Managing the online reviews and what’s being said about your brand at the local level is really important. There’s also a confused question around social. National brands want to have social, but are playing around with the concept of whether to make it local or not. How do we make sure the social, local element is genuine, is monitored, is engaged?

DMN: Does every brand really need social?

Gombert: I think you’ve got to quantify social in smaller buckets. It’s hard to argue that any brand shouldn’t have some kind of national social presence, monitoring and responding to reviews, or [have] customer support like a platform like [on] Twitter. In almost every case, a brand will have a use for social media where they will be engaged. Social is by nature an engaged participatory medium. If the local affiliate isn’t going to participate and engage with their social network, you’re going to end up doing more harm than good. I think it goes back to knowing what your objectives are, and knowing you can’t control the medium … social is by nature a scary beast. Make sure you’re using the right channel and are prepared to deal with what you’re uncomfortable with.

Intronis today announced that Jenaly Technology Group’s MJ Shoer won its 2012 Backup and Disaster Recovery Marketing Contest, which was co-sponsored by theTechnology Marketing Toolkit.

Hundreds of channel-industry professionals voted for their choice of the best BDR marketing campaign from among three finalists. Each pitched their marketing programs and the new business that they generated during a live teleseminar last week.

Shoer wins a $5,000 gift certificate for a dream vacation through Bluefish Executive Concierge Service. He will also serve as ambassador to the industry and as an Intronis spokesperson at select events and engagements in 2012.

“I truly value a company that invests in partnering with us and helps us be better at what we do. Intronis is a company that exemplifies this from my perspective,” Shoer said. “As a spokesperson, I can share compelling stories of why IT providers would improve their services and their business by partnering with Intronis.”

Technology Marketing Toolkit recently re-launched its BDR-In-A-Box Marketing System, and Intronis partnered with Technology Marketing Toolkit to promote the system’s adoption and use.

“This contest was a great incentive to encourage our channel partners to market their backup and disaster recovery services aggressively and share their success stories so others could learn from their example,” said Robin Robins, CEO of Technology Marketing Toolkit and author of the BDR-in-a-Box Marketing Program.

John Motazedi of SNC Squared and Scott Spiro of Computer Solutions Group, Inc. joined Shoer as finalists in the contest. They were selected based on the quality of their written essays, which included sales results, marketing campaign collateral, and customer success stories.

“The quality of Scott, John and MJ’s entries were second to none,” said Carol Ferrari, vice president of marketing at Intronis. “Each delivered multi-channel marketing campaigns that delivered quantifiable and impressive results, and we’re glad to share their success with our partners. All are truly winners with the results they achieved for their companies.”

Interviews and written submissions from each of the finalists, along with a video announcing contest results, are posted to http://campaign.intronis.com/RevenueGeneratingwithIntronis.html.

About Robin Robins and Technology Marketing Toolkit

Robin Robins is an independent technology marketing consultant, sales trainer and author who specializes in inexpensive and highly effective marketing strategies for small to medium VARs, Systems Integrators, Managed Services Providers, Solution Providers and IT consulting firms. She has developed and authored the Technology Marketing Toolkit System which is the definitive guide to marketing technology services. She currently runs the largest sales and marketing coaching program in the world for IT consulting firms and managed services providers. For more information, please visit our website at http://www.technologymarketingtoolkit.com.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup + 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 and SQL backup on the market, U.S.-based customer support, and is also integrated to major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs and the industry spoke by awarding Intronis the 2011 Vendor of the Year from ASCII. http://www.intronis.com.