Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting and personalization solutions for websites, is launching a nationwide search for ambitious and talented engineers. With 16 engineering positions currently available and aggressive growth plans throughout 2012, the company is offering a $2,000 bonus to any person who refers an engineering candidate that is hired. Additionally, Monetate is willing to help with relocation costs for candidates outside of the Philadelphia area.

“Monetate engineers process terabytes of data in Hadoop, write distributed applications in Python and JavaScript that run in front of millions of users every day.” said Tom Janofsky, VP Engineering at Monetate. “Our engineers are encouraged to deliver innovative technology solutions and are on the front lines of a platform that serves billions of page views each month for some of the top brands in the world.”

“As an engineer, I understand the excitement of working with today’s most cutting-edge technologies in an environment where you can build and ship products that are making a significant difference,” said Monetate founder and CEO David Brussin. “At Monetate, we have created a strong engineering culture that focuses both on shipping product and solving problems the right way.”

Monetate engineers deliver product innovations that make a significant impact on the businesses of large brands such as Best Buy, Sports Authority, Urban Outfitters, and many others on a daily basis. The company offers engineers a fast-paced work environment that nurtures their pre-existing desire to learn. In addition to its commitment to innovation, Monetate offers a wide range of company culture benefits challenging technical problems to work on and skilled engineers to team with.

To view current engineering and other positions available at Monetate, click here.

About Monetate

Monetate is the leading provider of testing, targeting, and personalization solutions for websites. The company’s cloud based platform empowers marketers to test and target product offers and site features and convert successful tests into personalized messaging and promotional campaigns, instantly, anywhere on the website. Monetate removes the IT bottleneck and is quick and easy to install using just a single JavaScript tag, inserted only once, and requiring no internal IT resources. Some of the best known brands in the world use Monetate to make the most of their online marketing dollars, increase conversion rates, and personalize the website experience including Best Buy, Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, Altrec, The Sports Authority, PETCO, QVC and more. Based in Philadelphia, Monetate serves a growing list of B2C websites around the world. For more information about Monetate, visit http://www.monetate.com.

Cloud automation provider Skytap announced the addition of new capabilities for its cloud computing platform.

The company is enhancing Skytap Cloud by introducing support for Open Virtualization Format (OVF), advanced notification services, and self-healing automation capabilities for robust virtual private networking.

New features plus Open Virtualization Format

“Customers choose Skytap for our unmatched self-service simplicity, deep levels of visibility and control, and the ability to easily move complex virtualized enterprise environments into a secure cloud environment without changes,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. ““These new product capabilities further extend Skytap’s innovation and leadership along these key dimensions.”

““Cloud computing discussions have advanced from what is the cloud and how will it impact my business, to understanding what applications are ideal candidates for different cloud models,” said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. “What we are observing are that many enterprises are leveraging public and even hybrid cloud models for low risk scenarios that still require placement flexibility such as development and testing, product demonstrations and technical training.”

The new advanced notification service enables real-time alerts when configurable utilization levels of cloud computing capacity are reached. Real-time notification rules are intuitive to set up and flexible. Self-healing automation features ensure high availability and secure connections to private data centers are maintained.  This secure networking intelligence is efficient at reconnecting available VPN connections with the Skytap hybrid cloud environment.

Skytap provides self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity.

Skytap Inc., which provides self-service cloud automation solutions to approximately 150 midmarket customers, has updated its offering with notification services, self-healing automation capabilities for virtual private networking, and support for Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

The company’s intent is to make cloud computing easier to use for business users, while offering the visibility and control required by IT professionals.

In September the company announced automation innovations, with tools that could deliver cost savings of as much as 70%, if not more. Skytap also released a new set of solutions to bring management simplicity and federation to clouds of all shapes and sizes.

According to recent data from IDC, cloud computing will continue to reshape the IT landscape over the next five years. Spending on public IT cloud services expands at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6%, from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in 2015.

The latest additions include a notification service that provides real-time alerts when end-users or groups reach configurable utilization levels of cloud computing capacity. Notifications can also be set based on total virtual machine hours or the number of total hours that any given virtual configuration has been continuously running.

Extensions to Skytap’s secure networking intelligence automatically detect VPN connections that may periodically disconnect or fail to reconnect properly, and reconnects available VPN connections with the Skytap hybrid cloud environment. The support for the OVF open standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines (VMs) and software eases VM portability and decreases platform dependence by enabling users to leverage a common set of tools across virtual environments. OVF will complement the company’s existing support for the VMDK file format from VMware.

Skytap’s new cloud capabilities provides users improved visibility and thus control over their costs, says Cameron Haight, research VP, IT operations management, Gartner, Inc. “Notifications can be set that enable consumers to be alerted to resource consumption thresholds being breached. This is important because often times the justification for using, for example, public clouds is at least partially derived from cost savings. Inefficient usage could make those potential savings evaporate.”

Haight says the cloud service market is being driven primarily by cost and agility, or time-to-provision. He thinks users in general of public cloud services should welcome this increased visibility especially in these challenging economic times where IT expenses are under continuous review.

Monetate the leading provider of test solutions and personalization goals for websites, today announced that customers using the platform Monetate reached record levels.

Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting and personalization solutions for websites, today announced that customer usage of the Monetate platform has reached record levels. Monetate has now delivered over 6 billion personalized website experiences for dozens of top clients such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, Brookstone and Urban Outfitters. These and other clients average 48 concurrent testing and targeting campaigns every day, contributing to a 29% increase in the total number of campaigns served on the Monetate platform during the past quarter.

“The number one goal for online marketers is to consistently deliver engaging content and experiences that keep their customers coming back for more,” said Monetate founder and CEO David Brussin. “In order to accomplish this, organizations must embrace an agile marketing structure that is not bogged down by platform limitations, software constraints, and limited IT resources. We are leading the end of the ‘one-size fits all web’ by empowering our clients to make rapid changes to online customer experiences that make a positive impact on their business.”

Monetate data shows that its customers are taking advantage of the ability to easily develop and test multiple marketing campaigns in real-time. Among companies that test the content of their marketing campaigns on their websites, Monetate clients currently average approximately 16 times as many campaigns when compared to the industry average of approximately one to five, according to the Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2011 from eConsultancy.

“In order to make the most of their budgets, marketers must consistently experiment, iterate and adjust their tactics based on what is proven to work,” said digital marketing expert Bryan Eisenberg. “Monetate gives organizations the speed and agility to bring meaningful change to the website based on real-time data and knowledge about customer behavior, without having to rely on overburdened IT departments.”

About Monetate

Monetate is the leading web-based platform for website testing, targeting and personalization. The company’s cloud-based platform empowers marketers to test and target product offers and site features, and convert successful tests into personalized messaging and promotional campaigns, instantly, anywhere on the website. Monetate removes the IT bottleneck and is quick and easy to install using just a single JavaScript tag, inserted only once, and requiring no internal IT resources. Some of the best known brands in the world use Monetate to make the most of their online marketing dollars, increase conversion rates, and personalize the website experience, including Best Buy, Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, Altrec, The Sports Authority, PETCO, QVC and more. Based in Philadelphia, Monetate serves a growing list of B2C websites around the world. For more information about Monetate, visit http://www.monetate.com.

Skytap, the self-service cloud automation house, Tuesday introduced advanced notification services, self-healing automation capabilities for robust virtual private networking, and support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

The widgetry is supposed to give businesses a simple secure way to use its hybrid or public cloud and speed cloud adoption.

The company is most excited about its real-time e-mail alerts telling users they’ve tapped out on cloud capacity. Examples include administrator-defined thresholds for available storage, compute and networking capacity assigned as quotas to specific end users or teams.

Notifications can also be set based on total virtual machine hours or the number of total hours that any given virtual configuration has been continuously running.

Businesses benefit from increased control and visibility into cloud use and costs, and can proactively avoid a surprise end-of-the-month bill.

Skytap can now automatically detect dicey VPN connections that may periodically disconnect or fail to reconnect properly, and reconnect them to its hybrid cloud environment.

This self-healing automation ensures that the Skytap Cloud remains available and securely connected to private data centers, while reducing service interruption and the need to manually troubleshoot periodic VPN connectivity issues.

Lastly the Skytap Cloud now supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), the open standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines and software.

OVF automates the import and installation of existing workloads and virtualized configurations between private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures. OVF support is supposed to ease VM portability and decrease platform dependence by letting users leverage a common set of tools across virtual environments. It’s supposed to complement Skytap’s support for VMware’s VMDK file format.

Skytap currently has around 150 accounts. It figures the new technology could bring in the next 100.

Monetate, the leading provider of testing, targeting and personalization solutions for websites, today announced that customer usage of the Monetate platform has reached record levels.

Cloud test and dev service provider, Skytap plans to expand to other colo facilities beyond its Savvis data center in Tukwila, Washington, next year, according to Brett Goodwin, VP of marketing and biz dev at Skytap.

Savvis always seemed like an odd choice for Skytap which recevied funding early on from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“It’s part of our 2012 plan to expand and explore our options,” Goodwin said refering to the company’s existing colocation agreement with Savvis. He declined to get into the matter further. Savvis was acquired by CenturyLink earlier this year.

Goodwin said Skytap has approximately 150 enterprise customers, mostly in the mid-market, using its cloud service and their requirements for storage, especially, keep growing.

Skytap announced three new features to its cloud service this week. The first is a set of advanced notification features that alert admins when users are close to a threshold limit instead of manually having to check when those users are close to their quotas of storage or CPU usage etc.

The second feature is a self-healing capability that auto detects when a VPN connection has broken and reconnects it. This is important for users doing hybrid cloud that need to maintain a connection between their private and public cloud environment.

And lastly Skytap is now supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for users that have multiple hypervisors in their infrastructure, beyond just VMware. This is helpful for users exporting workloads from Skytap back into a private infrastructure that runs on Xen, KVM or Windows Hyper-V, for example.

“Over time we’ll see ever more commodization in the hypervisors,” said Goodwin.