News Facts:

• Zmags, the leading provider of rich media mobile and social merchandising, today released the findings from a study of the behaviors and profiles of online and mobile shoppers. An infographic of the survey results can be found athttp://www.zmags.com/blog/?p=1080
• A key finding was that only four percent of consumers prefer to shop using mobile apps on their smartphones or tablets. This may surprise retailers for whom branded apps have been a priority over browser-based mobile and tablet commerce strategies. By comparison:
  • 87 percent of consumers prefer to browse and buy from websites via PCs or laptops.
  • 14 percent prefer to shop via mobile websites on their smartphones and nine percent with tablets.
• The survey also revealed that, while tablet shopping is gaining traction across many retail categories, consumers are starting to show category-specific device preferences. For example, 53 percent of shoppers for electronics prefer to use a tablet. Retailers will need to balance investments to ensure their tablet, smartphone and Web shopping experiences are optimized to match consumers’ growing device preferences.
  • After electronics, shoppers for toys displayed the most preference for tablet shopping (39 percent), followed by clothing (37 percent) and travel (26 percent).
• The connected consumer’s tablet use and spending activity is on the rise. The survey found that 87 percent of tablet owners used their tablets for 2011 holiday shopping and spent an average of $325 with their tablets. Additionally, more than half of tablet owners browse or shop from their tablets at least weekly.
• More than 80 percent of connected consumers are active Facebook users, and tablet owners display a distinct preference for brand engagement and shopping on Facebook. This presents retailers and brands with a powerful opportunity to monetize their Facebook brand presence.
• The full Zmags report, entitled “Meet the Connected Consumer: How Tablets, Smartphones and Facebook are Changing the Ways Consumers Shop” can be downloaded at http://org-www2.zmags.com/resources/connectedconsumer/step1
• The survey of 1,500 consumers who own a computer, smartphone and/or tablet was conducted by Equation Research for Zmags during November 10-14, 2011.

Supporting Quote:

“The study clearly demonstrates that mobile and tablet apps, on their own, are just not meeting connected consumers’ browsing and purchasing needs in an increasingly complex retail landscape — and that browser-based commerce is their preference,” said W. Sean Ford, COO and CMO of Zmags. “For retailers and brands, there is enormous opportunity to capitalize on this complexity by designing engaging and consistent browser-based shopping experiences optimized for each device.”

About Zmags

Zmags helps thousands of the world’s most progressive global retailers and brands design brilliant and consistent marketing and merchandising campaigns across social, mobile, tablet, and e-commerce platforms, driving product discovery and inspiring impulse purchase(s). Using the Zmags on-demand rich media merchandising platform, leading brands have measurably and dramatically increased customer engagement, conversion rates, order size and brand loyalty without the burden of IT constraints. Zmags is among the fastest growing technology companies in North America, ranking #70 on the Deloitte 2011 Technology Fast 500.  Zmags is headquartered in Boston, MA. with European offices in London and Copenhagen. For more information about Zmags, please visit www.zmags.com.

Contact:

Samantha McGarry
InkHouse for Zmags
781-966-4107
[email protected]

Contact Information

Acronis says it has Microsoft and VMware to thank for a significant increase in partners worldwide.

The disaster recovery and data protection provider gained 3000 new partners globally in the last half of 2011; 500 of those from the Asia Pacific region, bringing the local total to 2000. It attributes the increase partly to the launch of its Global Partner Program, but says its visualization solutions are generating the most buzz.

A/NZ Pacific general manager Karl Sice told CRN Acronis’ partnerships with Microsoft and VMware for Hyper V and vmProtect products had proved lucrative. He declined to name any of the newly-gained partners but said small to medium businesses were starting to feel more confident about implementing visualization solutions.

“It continues to be quite a strong area, especially with SMBs which have moved from just talking about it to actual using it, and rolling it out across all sides of the organization,” he said.

Together with its distributors Datastor and Ingram Micro, Acronis will continue on a virtualization-specific partner recruitment drive throughout 2012. Sice said this year the company will focus more on the quality of partnerships rather than quantity.

“We’re ramping up the education piece, providing sales and technology opportunities for partners to get trained on Acronis, and putting investment on trying to generate demand,” he said. “We want to give opportunities to our community to know our solutions better and drive more interest and more opportunities in the marketplace as well.”

He is betting on the Global Partner Program to entice new channel members to Acronis’ business.

The multi-tier network offers a number of benefits spanning finance, training, support and marketing.

“[The program] introduces a level of structure in how we serve our partner community, particularly for partners who are growing significantly with us,” Sice said. “We can provide additional leads and opportunities for earning more, which has previously been available but not as structured. We’re getting to the stage now where it’s part of our process rather than just doing it as we can.”

News Facts:

• Zmags, the leading provider of rich media mobile and social merchandising, today announced that it has secured $7 million in financing from Square 1 Bank and from existing investors OpenView Venture Partners and Northcap Partners.
• The financing arrives as Zmags continues to add innovative world-class retailers and consumer brands to its customer portfolio, including Kenneth Cole, Express and Tesco. These companies are using Zmags’ CommercePro to design brilliant and consistent marketing and merchandising campaigns across social, mobile, tablet and ecommerce platforms.
• Zmags is one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America, ranking #70 on the Deloitte 2011 Technology Fast 500, with 1,730 percent revenue growth since 2006.
• This latest round of financing will enable Zmags to continue its global development plans for CommercePro, its SaaS platform that integrates commerce transaction capability directly into the digital merchandising and catalog environment and relieves retailers from the burden of IT constraints.
• Zmags’ CommercePro is driving as much as a 500 percent increase in page views, more than 40 percent lift in order sizes, and 100 percent increase in conversions, significantly augmenting the results of retailers’ and brands’ core e-commerce platforms.
• With this proven performance, coupled with the explosive growth of mobile, social and tablet commerce, demand for Zmags’ CommercePro has exceeded expectations. The new round of financing will enable Zmags to further fast track its product development, client services and strategy, enabling the company to fully capitalize on this exploding market opportunity in the new year.
• Zmags anticipates closing an additional growth equity round in 2012, with a leading global private equity firm that has significant retail and brand experience, to support future expansion and strategic acquisitions.

Supporting Quotes:

“This additional financing supports our pioneering position in the rich media merchandising space, especially in tablet, mobile and social commerce,” said Michael Schreck, CEO and President, Zmags. “The immersive ‘shopping discovery’ experience that our platform uniquely delivers leverages the intuitive navigation millions of consumers now adore with the tablet (particularly the iPad). Our flagship offering, CommercePro, along with our full suite of SaaS offerings, provide the most advanced rich media merchandising platform on the planet, already serving global leaders including Kenneth Cole, Tesco, Ikea, Express, Neiman Marcus, Laura Ashleyand literally thousands of others.”

“The tablet and social commerce markets are booming. We look forward to continuing to support Zmags’ rapid growth and momentum as the preferred platform for top global retailers and brands looking for the best way to truly engage their consumers across all these new mediums,” said Firas Raouf, Venture Partner, OpenView Venture Partners.

“Zmags’ SaaS technology is squarely in the sweet spot of the mobile, tablet and social commerce areas,” said Bob Foley, managing director, Square 1 Bank. “We look forward to further supporting their innovative management team and ongoing development of the company.”

About Zmags

Zmags helps thousands of the world’s most progressive global retailers and brands design brilliant and consistent marketing and merchandising campaigns across social, mobile, tablet, and e-commerce platforms, driving product discovery and inspiring impulse purchase(s). Using the Zmags on-demand rich media merchandising platform, leading brands have measurably and dramatically increased customer engagement, conversion rates, order size and brand loyalty without the burden of IT constraints. Zmags is among the fastest growing technology companies in North America, ranking #70 on the Deloitte 2011 Technology Fast 500. Zmags is headquartered in Boston, MA. with European offices in London and Copenhagen. For more information, please visit  www.zmags.com.

Contact:

Samantha McGarry

InkHouse for Zmags
781-966-4107
[email protected]

The virtualization landscape has changed for the better for SMBs. The technology required is no longer just a viable option for enterprises with ample budgets and vast resources; it’s now available to companies of all sizes.

With an increase in the number of available virtualization options, and analysts including Gartner and IDC predicting growth in the sector – 2012 is set to be the year that virtualization becomes a reality in the SMB space.

Virtual benefits

There are many reasons for an SMB to virtualize its servers: it helps reduce capital and running costs; it allows organizations to be more flexible and nimble in response to market changes; and, as every environmentally-aware company knows, helps reduce the data centre’s carbon footprint through lower power and cooling requirements.

But with the growth in virtualization comes the explosion of virtual machines as more servers are consolidated. Protecting and managing the data against failure or loss becomes a priority. Unfortunately parts of the market are slow to adapt with some traditional backup vendors still using the same physical backup tools for their customers’ virtual environments. This is the wrong approach. The virtual environment has specific needs, which means the backup solution used should be designed for it.

As virtualization leads to larger volumes of data to manage, the need to spend more time on backup processes increases, which in turn puts more pressure on already busy backup windows. It also impacts capacity requirements, as more storage volumes are needed to store the data.

Since virtual machines are running as files on the host OS system, performing online backups can be difficult. Virtual machine (VM) images can be large and unwieldy to manage and can cause network bottlenecks. In addition, if a physical server fails, it will affect all of the virtual machines and application interdependencies running on that particular piece of hardware.

Who’s in charge

The responsibility for backing up and restoring that data has become an issue of internal politics, especially in the mid to top end spectrum of the SMB space.  The most likely rivals for ownership are the virtual administrator, the storage specialist and the database manager. As more people deploy applications and production machines throughout their networks, additional collaboration is needed to manage the data through its lifecycle.

Conflicts will arise as the different individuals try to execute different goals, not one of which compliments the other. So whose job is it to protect, secure and recover data? If you make it everyone’s job, it becomes no one’s responsibility.

Everyone wants to control the data, from the database managers to virtualization administrators. In time, we will see some consolidation and it will shift back to the storage administrators to manage data and backup centrally. But for now, the most important decision is to make sure all digital data, whether it resides in a physical or virtual environment, is protected.

Once you have determined who will manage and protect the data, the next most important step is to find out what needs to be backed up, how often it needs to be backed up and establishing the necessary windows in which to schedule backups without resource contention.

It is essential that companies take their virtual backup and disaster recovery strategies seriously and make sure they factor in a backup and recovery plan from the very start, in order to avoid the risk of losing data. The best way to do this is to work with a third party who can advise you about the best solution for your needs and then work with you to migrate your data to the new environment.

Research released by Acronis in early 2011, asked SMBs about their current approach to backing up their physical and virtual environments and over half of organizations said they used a separate backup application for each different server environment. Three-quarters (74 percent) then went on to say their preferred approach was to use a single backup application for their virtual and physical environments.

By using a solution that bridges the differences between the physical and virtual worlds, you can take maximum advantage of both, while supporting their business continuity objectives.

Virtualization is fast maturing into an effective means of optimizing IT infrastructures, and the protection of data in virtualized infrastructures should be a key consideration in each virtualization rollout.

Backing up virtual machines need not be complicated. Choosing a data protection and disaster recovery solution that allows companies to manage both physical and virtual environments under the same framework can really simplify the process.

David Blackman is the General Manager of Northern Europe and MEA at Acronis.

Zmags, the Boston-based mobile and social commerce company, has raised $7 million from Square 1 Bank and existing investors OpenView Venture Partners and Northcap Partners.

Zmags makes a software platform to help brands and retailers design marketing and merchandising campaigns across mobile devices, tablets, and Web. The new money roughly doubles the amount Zmags has raised to date; the company expects to close an additional growth equity round this year. Last May, CEO Michael Schreck spoke with me about the firm’s transition from digital publishing to commerce, and about mobile marketing trends over the past decade.

—Jumptap, the Cambridge, MA-based mobile advertising firm, has been working with Mitt Romney to create and run targeted campaign ads (at the zipcode level) for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primaries. The company says Romney is the first candidate to run mobile ads in both sites. We’ll be watching to see how mobile technologies influence the upcoming presidential election.

—Apperian, the Boston maker of a mobile-app platform for businesses, is powering AT&T’s new mobile application management product. The software helps companies and other organizations create, distribute, and manage secure mobile apps. Apperian has worked with AT&T for the past several years, but the newannouncement could be an important validation of where Apperian stands in the market.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy’s National IT Editor and the Editor of Xconomy Boston. You can e-mail him at [email protected], call him at 617-252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at @gthuang.