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.

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 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, mobile or tablets. 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 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 data storage is providing opportunities for many new services. Xtium is delivering cloud computing to mid-size enterprises. But, that was not the plan when the company started. Now, Xtium has obtained a new capital infusion of $11,500,000 to expand delivery of its cloud-based model for smaller entities.

Xtium provides private cloud computing, virtual hosting, storage, and full disaster recovery. The company’s services are similar to Amazon and IBM, but are targeted to mid-size businesses with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Cost-conscious customers are attracted to the simple price system of Xtium. In addition, the company reports that some mid-size operations initially rely on Xtium only for disaster recovery with cloud storage. But, Xtium then transitions these customers to other back-end services. The flexible system of payment for each usage simplifies marketing to growing companies that must watch their budgets carefully.

Xtium was founded in 2004 but only started managing cloud computing services for customers in 2007. Based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the company intends to use its new funding for expansion. Plans include hiring more employees and making additional investment in the company’s cloud technologies.

Xtium is an established name in the industry and reports strong revenue growth in 2011. As more companies look to migrate to cloud networks, Xtium is seeking to dominate the market among mid-size customers. This expectation appears promising as Xtium is leveraging its experience at managing low-cost virtual networks for such enterprises.

Disaster recovery and data protection vendor Acronis has released the latest version of its Snap Deploy solution.

According to an announcement released by the company, Snap Deploy 4 assists IT administrators to copy exact images of data, including operating systems, and move them from one device to another.
The product is meant to help customers backup of the various operating system and servers on a network through a standard “master image”, according to the statement.

The company suggests the product can be used for such tasks as on-boarding of new employees, computer-based training exercises in classroom environments and company mergers and acquisitions that necessitate the deployment of a master image across new environments.

This latest version allows for custom configuration on a per-machine basis, and support for VMs with the ability to deploy directly from VHD files.

Acronis Snap Deploy 4 is licensed per machine or can be purchased per deployment in batches. Pricing starts at AU$35 per workstation license and $159 per server.

Acronis distributes in New Zealand through Ingram Micro. (It also distributes its retail products through Mindscape).

WAN optimization solutions vendor Exinda has announced the launch of a new UK partner program. The vendor has also strengthened its UK sales and technical teams to capitalize on the growing interest from resellers in pushing next generation WAN optimization solutions.

The new partner program sees the creation of a platinum partner status aimed at a select number of VARs that want to commit and invest in building successful business revenues with Exinda. The plan is to recruit a total of up to 10 platinum partners by the end of the year.

Benefits of the platinum partner status include increased margin; deal registration; lead generation; sales and technical training; joint marketing; technical services and support.

Exinda is also evaluating its existing gold partners as part of a review to establish a more committed and focused business relationship with partners moving forward.

“We are fully committed to a two-tier channel model in the UK and have a proven distribution partner in Vadition,” explained Adam Davison, Exinda’s VP Sales EMEA.

“We are now looking to aggressively recruit a select number of value added resellers as platinum partners. These partners will live and breathe our unified performance management story and have the skills to fully capitalise on the only truly integrated visibility, QoS and acceleration platform in the market, as well as our unique video caching capabilities,” he added.

We’re ideally placed in this burgeoning market opportunity for next generation WAN optimization as enterprises look to realize the benefits of Cloud, SaaS, video and Web 2.0 applications,” Davison continued.

Exinda has made a number of key personnel appointments to its UK sales and technical support teams. David Richards – formerly of Blue Coat, Packeteer and Juniper – and Rob Marshall – an ex-Bluefort employee – have been appointed as regional sales managers for the North & Scotland and the South & Ireland respectively. Louise Robson has also joined the sales team from Riverbed to take up an inside sales role responsible for driving lead generation activities.

“There are fantastic opportunities for Exinda resellers in the UK market,” commented Neil Ledger, joint CEO of Vadition, part of the Exclusive Networks Group. “It is growing revenues worldwide, year-on-year, at a rate consistently above 100%, and recently reported revenue growth of over 49% for the three months ended September 30, 2011, compared with the same period in 2010. Much of this is fueled by the expansion of its sales and support capabilities in markets like the UK.”

Exinda’s technical team has also been boosted by the appointments of Simon Jackson and Tim Reeve. With previous experience gained at Websense, Blue Coat and Packeteer the appointments further enhance Exinda’s pre-sales and technical support capabilities.

Davison concluded: “We have assembled a stellar team of people that have proven track records, pedigree and credibility in the market. They have all achieved high levels of success at competitive organizations and it is testament to Exinda’s technology, industry vision and market proposition that they have decided to switch allegiances away from these legacy vendors in favour of our next generation WAN optimization approach.”

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions incorporating Unified Performance Management, today announced that Phil Montgomery has joined its Board of Directors.