Last week, Boston venture capital firm OpenView Partners released its latest research report on geographical and sector trends for technology companies in the expansion stage.

Over the past few years, research from Pricewaterhouse Coopers has indicated that three areas of the US – Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley – dominate the venture capital scene. The research conducted by OpenView Labs focused on identifying areas outside of the big three that have secured venture capital in the first half of 2011.

According to the team’s research Los Angeles, Northwest/Seattle, Midwest/Chicago, Texas, and D.C. Metro area are all on the verge of becoming hot spots for receiving venture capital. As young companies continue to secure funding away from the traditional hot spots, each of these areas has worked to carve their own niche in the investment landscape.

The report features commentary from venture capitalists including Howard Morgan of First Round Capital, Chris Girgenti of New World Ventures, Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Partners, and George Roberts of OpenView Partners.

“Recently a CEO told me he was turned down for capital because he company isn’t location in Silicon Valley. That story saddened me because OpenView would never make such a statement; we go to them, rather than telling a company to come to us,” said George Roberts.

The research revealed the following:

•     50 deals in the D.C Metro area totaling $189.3 million in investment
•     75 deals in the Midwest totaling $455.3 million in venture capital (all data current through Q2 201)
•     Investments total $479.9 million in the software sector and $376.5 million in media and entertainment sector across the 5 areas analyzed in the study

Be sure to visit OpenView Partners for the full report.

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. Founded in 2006, the firm has a total of $240 million under management. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis. OpenView recently released OpenView Labs, an idea site for senior managers at expansion stage technology companies. For more information, please visit OpenView Labs directly.

VersionOne has reported that it is now approved by Project Management Institute (PMI) to become a PMI Registered Education Provider (REP), effective November, Market Watch reports.

PMI REPs are educational organisations that have demonstrated their ability to provide world-class, effective project management training. Through PMI’s rigorous quality criteria for course content, instructor qualification and instructional design, REPs provide the project management training necessary to earn and to maintain Project Management Professional (PMP)(R), Program Management Professional (PgMP)(R) and other PMI professional credentials.

“PMI continues to define standards and promote excellence in project management. With the increasing adoption of agile practices, it’s our hope we can merge PMI and agile best practices and educate a whole new host of practitioners,” Virtual Strategy quotes Robert Holler, founder and CEO of VersionOne, as saying. “As longstanding supporters of PMI, VersionOne is pleased to be recognised with this important certification.”

“PMI’s recent survey of training providers shows that 80% of organisations seeking suppliers of project management training strongly prefer to work with PMI REPs. They view their affiliation with PMI, the leading standard-setting professional association for project management, as a stamp of quality on the training services they purchase,” said Edwin Andrews, Ph.D., director of academic and educational programmes and services at PMI. “Organisations want to protect their investment in project management training, and they know that a PMI REP delivers such training in a cost-effective and efficient manner.”

Currently, there are over 1 400 REPs in more than 70 countries. These organisations include commercial training providers that design complete educational systems, academic institutions, internal training offices at corporations and government agencies.

Acronis, a backup software company that works closely with some MSPs, is making a high-impact executive move — naming Red Hatexecutive sales wizard Alex Pinchev as its next president and CEO. The move, effective Jan. 17, 2012, could further accelerate Acronis’s global sales strategy.

Acronis claims to be one of the fastest growing privately held software companies in the United States — though I don’t have access to the company’s financial results. Among the data points worth noting, Acronis has:

• More than 175,000 business customers and over 3 million consumer customers worldwide — served by more than 20,000 partners.
• A channel effort that includes the Acronis MSP partner program.
• A longstanding relationship with Kaseya. Last I heard, the Kaseya Backup 4.0 offering was based on Acronis storage technology. But I need to double-check the relationships status.
• Promoted cross-platform virtualization support for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix and Parallels.

Pinchev replaces outgoing CEO Jason Donahue. Acronis did not disclose the reason for the executive change, but the company has navigated executive transitions before. Former Acronis CEO Walter Scott (now head of GFI Software) apparently built Acronis into a $100 million software company before leaving in 2008, according to Wikipedia. I don’t know current annual revenue figures for Acronis.

Who Is Pinchev?

Meanwhile, Acronis gains a talented sales and software executive in Pinchev. He most recently was president of global sales, services and field marketing at Red Hat — which is on track to become the world’s first $1 billion open source company this year. Pinchev spent nine years at Red Hat, which derives roughly 50 to 60 percent of its revenue from channel partners, MSPmentor has heard.

Ilya Zubarev, chairman of the board at Acronis, said in a prepared statement: “We believe that Alex’s strong leadership will accelerate Acronis’ journey to be a global leader in backup & recovery solutions not only for physical servers, but for virtual environments, and into the cloud.”

Generally speaking, I don’t hear much from Acronis; several rival backup companies seem to have higher profiles in the managed services partner ecosystem. But I respect Pinchev’s track record at Red Hat. We’ll be watching to see if or how Pinchev adjusts the Acronis partner strategy in January.

About VersionOne

Disaster recovery vendor Acronis has announced that former Red Hat sales boss Alex Pinchev will take over as the firm’s president and chief executive early next year.

Pinchev will start work at Acronis on 17 January 2012 and will replace Jason Donahue, who has led the company since 2008.

In a statement to ChannelWeb, Laurent Dedenis, president of worldwide sales and marketing at Acronis, confirmed that Donahue would be leaving the firm.

“Jason Donahue has made a positive impact to Acronis over the last three years, but decided to step down in order to pursue his own personal and career goals,” said the statement. “He will be leaving Acronis after the transition period.”

Before joining Acronis, Pinchev had served on the company’s board of directors since November 2010. He has spent the past nine years at open-source software giant Red Hat, most recently as the firm’s president of global sales, services and field marketing.

Ilya Zubarev, chairman of the board at Acronis, said: “We are proud to have an industry leader of Alex’s calibre join us at this time in the company’s development.

“Since Alex joined our board in 2010, we have benefited from his extensive experience, sharp business acumen and vision for the future of development of virtual and cloud markets,” he added.

Pinchev said: “With a successful business in data protection and disaster recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, Acronis now has the opportunity to further develop its routes to market and expand its technology presence.”

It’s no secret that influence plays an important role in business.

Entrepreneurs are often influenced by the mentors they’ve learned under. Employees are influenced by the culture they work in. And buyers are influenced by the ones they trust when it comes down to making critical purchasing decisions.

Influencer marketing is a practice geared toward targeting and building relationships with key individuals that have influence over a company’s target segment — and ideally the target buyers.

Today the team at OpenView Labs releases it latest eBook to help startup and expansion stage companies implement an influencer marketing strategy within their businesses. The new eBook, The Value of Influence: The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing, features checklists and step-by-step guides for the key roles to help companies get started with influencer marketing very quickly.

Industry experts including Nick Hayes, author and founder of Influencer50; Joe Chernov, VP of Content Marketing for Eloqua; Dan Dillon, Manager of Influence Marketing for Perceptive Software; and Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and Senior Advisor to OpenView, have contributed unique ideas and insight to help entrepreneurs and marketers successfully build the practice of influencer marketing into their organizations.

“First off, influencer marketing is nothing new. Companies have targeted influencers for years in order to help get their story told or get coverage in the media. The difference today is mainly twofold: 1) the influencers in your target market include a whole new set of businesses and individuals, and 2) you have direct access to these people through social media. To the first point, these “new” influencers are very important to a variety of your marketing goals. To the second point, it’s not just the tools that matter – it’s what goes in them,” said Joe Pulizzi.

Influencer marketing can be a valuable and cost-effective way to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Establish and/or enhance thought leadership position
• Drive more website traffic
• Generate more sales leads

“Influencer marketing is a great strategy to incorporate into your overall marketing mix in order to effectively reach your target audience. This eBook can help you set the right goals, develop your story and pitch, and manage the overall program so anyone can start or improve their,” said Amanda Maksymiw, Marketing Associate for OpenView Labs.

Visit the OpenView Labs to get your copy of The Value of Influence: the Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing to start and improve your growing company today.

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.