Synetix, a specialist provider of storage, security and infrastructure solutions to enterprises, has become one of Exinda’s first Platinum Partners in the UK.

The accreditation enhances Synetix’s status as a top tier partner for one of the market’s leading network optimisation vendors, and will support its future development of managed WAN services.

“We are delighted to become one of Exinda’s first platinum partners in the UK,” says Rick Gray, sales director at Synetix Solutions Ltd. “Exinda’s tightly integrated visibility, QoS and acceleration functions delivered as Unified Performance Management (UPM) makes it stick out as the only truly next generation WAN optimisation vendor, proven to deliver outstanding ROI through reduced hardware requirements, and we are reaping significant benefits for our customers, as well as margins for our business. We were able to recognise the potential of this technology early on, and are now perfectly placed to take advantage of the huge pipeline of business we generated around it; all of which is complementary to the Synetix next generation technology approach.”

Gray continues, “Exinda’s UPM approach addresses the pain points many enterprises are experiencing around network performance and application responsiveness. Thanks to Exinda, we are in a position to provide our customers with integrated monitoring, reporting, visibility and acceleration as a product-based solution or as a managed service – exactly what they need to accelerate their business critical applications.”

Exinda’s new Partner Programme, including the Platinum Partner status, was unveiled earlier this month. Adam Davison, Exinda’s VP Sales EMEA, explains, “We have designed the programme to help key partners like Synetix build successful long-term revenues with Exinda. The Platinum level is for resellers who can demonstrate their commitment and are ready to take their partnership to a new level of success and profitability. Its benefits include increased margin; deal registration; lead generation; sales and technical training; joint marketing; technical services and support.”

Davison concludes, “Through all of this, we are providing partners with the tools to make not only the highest margins, but also to realise the benefits of a next generation WAN optimisation solution designed for tomorrow’s cloud, SaaS and Web 2.0 marketplace.”

Intronis, the world’s leading cloud backup and recovery solution for the IT Channel, announced today that Kent Plunkett Chief Executive Officer was named one of the Top 100 Executives in the Channel by CRN.

This annual list salutes individual channel executives for continuing to change the way the channel does business to increase partner sales while shaping their own organization’s future.

CRN’s 2011 Top 100 Executives list was based on nominations from solution providers who rated channel vendor executives based on influence, effectiveness and viability, as well as business and sales impact. The CRN Editorial team judged nominees based on sales volume, channel investment and advocacy, and performance in 2011 CRN research projects such as Channel Champs and the Annual Report Card.

Kent Plunkett was included on the list of Top 100 Channel Executives because he has guided Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery to become a leader in the IT channel. Kent and the Intronis team have demonstrated that Intronis is not only a reliable solution, but a tremendous revenue builder. With his guidance, Intronis ensures that resellers can count on the company to be there every step of the way through the industry’s reliability leader, world class customer support, regional customer success team, and dedicated account managers.

Kent Plunkett, states “It is an honor to be recognized along with the other leading Channel Executives who also received this award. I am very proud of the team at Intronis, the value we give to the IT Channel, and being able to help each of our partners succeed in their businesses.

“From sales leaders and innovators to mavericks and up-and-comers, it takes different types of executives with different philosophies to drive continued success of the IT Channel,” said Kelley Damore, Vice President and Editorial Director for UBM Channel. “We’re recognizing this year’s Top 100 Executives for their commitment to the channel, as well as their determination to adopt new strategies and policies that drive greater sales for partners, while positioning their own company for future growth. We salute these leaders for their hard work and devotion to the technology channel.”

Expanded coverage of the 2011 Top 100 Executives will be featured in the November issue of CRN Magazine and online at http://www.crn.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 

About UBM Channel: (http://www.ubmchannel.com)

UBM Channel 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 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. UBM Channel is a UBM company. To learn more about UBM Channel, visit us at http://www.ubmchannel.com.

UBM plc (http://www.ubm.com)

UBM plc 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 http://www.ubm.com.

As cloud computing becomes more of a commodity, it will increasingly be the little things that will start to matter a lot more. For example, the quality of the network connection to the service provider and the flexibility of the cloud computing platform are increasingly going to be of more interest.

None of that is lost on the folks at Skytap, which recently added three small but interesting features to its cloud computing platform. The first is a Self-Healing Network Automation capability that not only makes it easy to set up a virtual private network (VPN), but it will also detect if a VPN connection drops and then restart it.

The second capability is support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which makes it easier to move workloads across different virtual machines just in case a customer decides for whatever reason to ditch one virtual machine platform for another, or simply move workloads back and forth between different virtual machine instances.

Finally, Skytap is including a new advanced notification service that alerts customers about when they are about to run out of capacity.

None of these capabilities on their own might convince a customer to select Skytap. But Brett Goodwin, Skytap vice president of marketing and business development, says collectively they show a commitment to service that customers are not going to get from rival cloud computing vendors such as Amazon or Google.

As we move into 2012 and IT organizations become more aware of what cloud computing means to them, the conversation is going to shift towards which vendor does it best for what price. Chances are pretty high that the answer may not turn out to be the biggest name in the industry once customers understand the differences between services.

Experts from two of Utah’s most successful technology companies, AtTask, Inc. and Ancestry.com, will school Utah executives on best practices for new media and PR success at the Utah Technology Council’s (UTC) (http://www.utahtechcouncil.org) Annual PR Clinic on December 9, 2011.

The program will be moderated by Mark Fredrickson, APR and director of corporate communications for TechMediaNetwork, one of the country’s fastest-growing online publishers and one of Utah’s most progressive companies. Fredrickson is also co-chair of the UTC Communications Committee.

Program presenters include:

• Ty Kiisel – Kiisel is manager of social outreach at Utah-based AtTask, host of theTalking Work podcast and a rising Forbes.com columnist. After just two months, readership for Kiisel’s columns is drawing more audience than many established, well-respected writers in the project management space.
• Heather Erickson – Erickson is director of corporate communications for Ancestry.com. Her PR placements have involved top name brands, products and companies with the largest daily national and global newspapers, trade and business publications and broadcast outlets. She’ll speak about effective, regionalized PR programs and how they act as a “secret weapon” to reinforce corporate growth strategies.

“Keeping up with emerging forms of media is more important than ever,” said Richard R. Nelson, Founder and CEO of UTC. “It’s essential that companies stay on the cutting edge of new media and marketing technologies as they become available. These new media experts will provide advice and expertise to help Utah technology companies build and maintain a strong and viable brand.”

The PR Event is Friday, December 9, 2011 at Neumont University in room 300. The address is 10701 South Riverfront Parkway, South Jordan, Utah. Cost of the event is $15 for UTC members and $30 for non-UTC members. Networking begins at 7:30 a.m. and the event runs from 8 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.

For more information on the UTC, including future events, and to become a member please visitwww.utahtech.org or call (801) 568-3500.

About the Utah Technology Council

Utah’s premier professional association, the Utah Technology Council has grown 18 percent a year for the past eight years becoming the essential business resource for high-tech, life science and clean-tech companies seeking to achieve greater success.  At its core, UTC exists to foster the Growth of the state’s 6,000 technology companies, ensure Utah develops the highest Quality Workforce in the nation and attract an ever-increasing array of Funding. Members join UTC to share insights with industry peers, counsel with government and academic leaders, and receive help from professional service providers and funding resources.

###

UTC PR Contact:

Judy Young, Executive Director

T) 801-568-3500

[email protected]

PR Agency Contact:

Cheryl Snapp Conner

Managing Partner, Snapp Conner PR

P-801 994-9625

C-801 376-2158

[email protected]

Cloud provider Skytap is looking to simplify use of its service, particularly as it applies to providing compatibility with in-house datacenters.

Skytap said it is providing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines.

By supporting OFV, users of Skytap’s cloud service will have an efficient and flexible way to import and export existing virtualized configurations without making changes to them, said Brett Goodwin, the company’s VP of marketing and business development. That means it will support the VHD format in Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Machine Image (AMI), Xen Disk Image and the QEMU format (qcow2) associated with KVM.

Until now, Skytap users were confined to using VMware’s VMDK file format. “It [OVF] improves the portability and decreases the platform dependence, and it also allows IT to leverage a common set of tools when they are working with VM workload software configurations on their end in the private infrastructure and on the hybrid and public cloud,” Goodwin said.

In addition, Skytap has added advanced notification, aimed at alerting both end users and IT if thresholds are exceeded such as compute or storage usage. The advanced notification capability is intended to avoid surprise bills, Goodwin explained. IT can set customized alerts to inform administrators if users are approaching certain usage thresholds, such as 90 percent of budgeted storage quotas.

The company has also added self-healing network automation to its service for those running hybrid cloud deployments, which is quite common among its customer base, Goodwin said. The self-healing features include auto-detecting VPN connection failures and automatically re-establishing those links.

Goodwin said its service is primarily used by those who develop and test applications, though it is also used for product and proof-of-concept demonstrations, as well as for IT and technical training.

This is the sort of company that makes covering the IPO market interesting. ExactTarget, which is in the email marketing business, just filed to go public.

It’s looking to raise $100 mn in fresh capital. The move comes after it abandoned IPO plans in 2009, as the financial crisis slammed the IPO window shut hard.

The Indianapolis Business Journal notes that ExactTarget is a tech company following in the footsteps ofGroupon and Angie’s List in what has become 2011’s IPO market second wind. The reality, however, is much different. ExactTarget is exciting because it is useful and has real revenues. Yes, it’s posting a widening loss, and that’s a problem (as we saw with Jive Software, among others), but the company’s service offering isn’t vapid.

Let’s take a look at the financials. ExactTarget posted YOY revenue growth of 55 percent for the first nine months of 2011, hitting $148 mn. Meanwhile, net loss stretched from $6 mn to $29.3 mn.

There’s a reason for this, though. According to IBJ, ‘ExactTarget has been investing with abandon to innovate, build market share and expand overseas.’ This will pay off down the road. In the past two years, IBJ continues, ExactTarget has made three acquisitions, added 500 employees and launched operations in the UK and Australia.

Also, the product is solid. Yes, this matters. In addition to providing a rich email marketing environment, ExactTarget has expanded into social media (not uncommon in the email marketing world). With US email, mobile and social media marketing spend projected to reach $15.7 bn in 2016 (from $4.8 bn in 2011), ExactTarget has plenty of room to grow.

We’re still in the early stages of the ExactTarget IPO process, and this will be a fun one to watch. Battery Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, the company’s venture capital investors, stand to benefit from the exit. The lead underwriters are JP Morgan, Stifel and Deutsche Bank.