eEye Digital Security, a provider of IT security and unified vulnerability management solutions, will exhibit at the ISSA SoCal Security Symposium at the Hyatt Regency in Long Beach, California on October 26, 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM.

eEye CTO, Marc Maiffret, will speak at the event, presenting “IT Security Insights: On the Frontline of the Threat Landscape.”

The Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) is an international organization providing educational forums, publications and peer interaction opportunities that enhance the knowledge, skills and professional growth of its member information security professionals. The primary goal of ISSA is to promote management practices that will ensure availability, integrity and confidentiality of organizational resources.

At the ISSA SoCal Security Symposium vendor exhibit, eEye will promote its new version of Retina CS, which dramatically reduces security risks in physical, mobile, and virtualized environments. Retina CS is the first vulnerability management solution to provide mobile device assessment as part of its unified vulnerability management solution, as well as the first and only solution to enable security for virtualized application packages deployed via VMware’s ThinApp™ technology. Retina CS integrates security risk discovery, prioritization, remediation, and reporting into a single, web-based console.

At the event, eEye will encourage attendees to download its latest free product, Retina CS Community, the industry’s first free vulnerability management solution for up to 128 IPs. Additionally, the Company will promote free, online resources including its Zero Day Tracker, which provides a catalogue of the newest zero-day vulnerabilities, instructions for quick remediation, and a historical record of past vulnerabilities, as well as theVulnerability Expert Forum (VEF), a popular monthly webinar attended by hundreds of IT security professionals seeking insight and information on recently announced critical vulnerabilities from Microsoft and other software vendors.

About eEye Digital Security

Since 1998, eEye Digital Security has made vulnerability and compliance management simpler and more efficient by providing the only unified solution that integrates assessment, mitigation, protection, and reporting into a complete offering with optional add-on modules for configuration compliance, regulatory reporting, and integrated patch management. eEye’s world-renowned research and development team is consistently the first to uncover critical vulnerabilities and build new protections into our solutions to prevent their exploit. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including the largest vulnerability management installations in the world, rely on eEye to protect against the latest known and zero-day vulnerabilities. More at eeye.com.

Zmags, a provider of rich media mobile and social merchandising, announced it ranked 70th on Deloitte’s 2011 Technology Fast 500 ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America.

According to a release from Zmags, the company grew 1730 percent from 2006-2010.
Serving more than 3,000 of the world’s most progressive brands in the retail, luxury and consumer products industries, Zmags’ merchandising platform enables its customers to mobilize their merchandise and strengthen brand value across tablets, websites, mobile devices and social media.

Technology Fast 500, which was conducted by Deloitte & Touche, a subsidiary of Deloitte, provides a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies both public and private — in North America.

Technology Fast 500 award winners are selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2006 to 2010. In order to be eligible for Technology Fast 500 recognition, companies must own proprietary intellectual property or technology that is sold to customers in products that contribute to a majority of the company’s operating revenues. Companies must have base-year operating revenues of at least $50,000 USD or CD, and current-year operating revenues of at least $5 million USD or CD.

Additionally, companies must be in business for a minimum of five years, and be headquartered within North America.

Brett Goodwin, a former marketing executive at Isilon Systems and RealNetworks, has joined fast-growing Seattle cloud computing startup Skytap as vice president of marketing and business development.

Goodwin was employee number 15 at Isilon, the Seattle storage company that sold to EMC last year for $2.25 billion. Before that, he spent six years at RealNetworks.

“The cloud is easily the most disruptive change in enterprise technology in more than a decade,” said Goodwin, who holds an MBA from Stanford and earned a degree in economics from Pomona College. “Skytap gives businesses a secure and simple way to use the cloud for complex computing environments.” Founded by computer scientists at the University of Washington, Skytap has raised cash from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Bezos Expeditions, OpenView Venture Partners and WRF Capital.

Fisher Interactive Network, the online arm of Seattle media company, has named Jenny Kuglin to the position of general manager of content & social media and Mike Seifert to the position of general manager of digital revenues.

“The General Managers will focus on the two most important disciplines necessary to succeed – serving the audience by creating engaging content and working with advertisers to benefit from its growth,” said FIN’s Randa Minkarah.

Kuglin, the former executive director of Northwest Cable News, joined Fisher Interactive in September 2010 as director of social media.  Seifert, the former vice president of global education at Pacific Institute, joined Fisher Interactive in February 2011 as Director of Sales.

Ubermind, the mobile app development company, has promoted Nick Fink to the position of user experience director. The Seattle company, which has developed apps for Target, REI, Amtrak and Alaska Airlines, said it has hired 54 employees since June 1. It now employs more than 150 at new offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.

Rumblefish, a Portland company that specializes in music licensing for social media, has named Harry DeMott of Raptor Ventures to the board. DeMott previously sat on the boards of Titan Outdoor, dMarc Broadcasting and Pandora.

Zooppa has named Tosh Meston — who previously worked at Blue Dot, MySpace and Vizrea — as director of engineering. The Seattle company also tapped Jessica Carter, a former TV veteran and employee at Subversionz Media, as manager of partner programs.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimisation solutions incorporating Unified Performance Management, today announced a fully featured new virtual appliance, which delivers each of the key benefits delivered by Unified Performance Management with its hardware-based WAN optimization solutions in a virtualized software load.

Enterprises and service providers can use the Exinda virtual appliance to deliver WAN optimization services to users and customers without having to use a dedicated hardware appliance.

The Virtual Exinda WAN Optimization Appliance is compatible with all major hypervisors in virtualized environments. It also supports industry leading flexibility with regards to storage; storage is not hard coded into the virtual appliance, but can be sourced through the virtual infrastructure and leverage the enterprise SAN architecture in place.  This will boost performance for optimization features that rely on disk storage such as the Exinda Edge Cache™, WAN Memory (data de-duplication), and CIFS Acceleration.

The Virtual Exinda WAN Optimization Appliance is currently being beta tested by service providers and enterprise data centers to provide public and private cloud-based optimization services. Enterprise Infrastructure and Operations executives who want to virtualize all functions can use the new virtual appliance in front of application servers to deliver visibility, traffic shaping and optimization services to all users, including mobile device users. Exinda’s hardware appliances are already in use by over 30 service providers around the world, providing cloud-based optimization services to computer and mobile device users.

“Virtualisation and cloud computing are the two biggest trends in computing today, and our new virtual appliance plays right into both of them,” said Kevin F. R. Suitor, vice president of marketing at Exinda. “Our virtual solution offering gives us more complete technology coverage on a variety of use cases in today’s market.”

The three pillars on which Unified Performance Management is built are:

– Visibility. This pillar operates at Layer 7 of the network, providing insight into all network activity, usage and performance. It provides CIOs with all the user and application information they need to keep their networks operating at peak performance. Exinda provides managers with in-depth reports on network traffic, which empowers them to rapidly take action to improve network performance, user experience and optimise productivity.

– Control. This pillar allows CIOs to optimize network resources to the needs of their organizations through comprehensive control over network traffic, without placing heavy-handed restrictions on users. Management can be done from a high level to dynamically shape and prioritize traffic, or it can be controlled at the user or group level, should specific users or groups have unique job requirements.

– Optimization. Exinda’s unique WAN optimization solution provides detailed application classification and prioritization, granular policy-based traffic control, and selective TCP and application acceleration. With Exinda, businesses can dramatically improve application response times, increase traffic throughput, and reduce the effects of latency. The result is near LAN-like application performance across the business’ WAN.

About Exinda®

Exinda is a proven global supplier of next generation WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The company has helped over 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide improve the end user experience, manage application performance, manage congestion over the WAN and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

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Press Contacts

Sarah Chidgey/David Evans
Cohesive Communications
[email protected]
01291 626200

Kevin Suitor
[email protected]
+1 416 840 5589 / 07766 714362

Exinda and the Exinda logo are trademarks of Exinda. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intronis, which promotes cloud backup services to MSPs, is on pace to grow 50 percent or more in 2011, according to CEO Kent Plunkett.

To maintain that growth, Intronis plans to double-down on the North America market, focusing like a laser on managed services providers that need cloud backup services. Plunkett described the Intronis cloud storage strategy to MSPmentor yesterday during an hour-long interview.

It has been roughly 12 to 14 months since Plunkett joined Intronis as CEO, succeeding co-founder Sam Gutmann. Externally, Plunkett has kept a pretty low profile in the market — preferring to maintain the spotlight on key team leaders like Intronis Channel Chief Ted Roller and VP of Marketing and Customer Success Carol Ferrari. When I asked Plunkett how Intronis managed to accelerate its growth in 2011, he said the company’s secret sauce involves an intense focus on MSP user experience, and putting the right people (Intronis team members) in the right seats at the right time on the Intronis bus.

Tracking the Numbers

Based on research from Business Solutions magazine, Intronis held about 25 percent of the file-based cloud backup market for MSPs as of early 2011. Plunkett believes Intronis market share has grown — though he says the cloud backup market will get more crowded (not less) because venture capital companies and private equity companies have money to invest. Over time, Plunkett believes three market tiers will emerge:

• Tier 1: A file-based cloud backup leader that has about 45 percent market share with MSPs. Plunkett believes Intronis will be that leader.
• Tier 2: Second- and third-place players that each have roughly 15 percent to 20 percent market share.
• Tier 3: A “ton of companies that will kill each other and lose lots of money fighting for the final 20 percent of the market.”

Plunkett said the “lure of selling direct” will distract cloud backup companies from doing what’s necessary to serve MSPs. “Our strategy is to focus everything on the MSPs. We want to be in almost half of all MSP accounts. Then, the next stage will involve a strategy to hold that hill. But first we’re taking the hill.”

Taking a Long-term View

When Plunkett arrived at Intronis, MSPmentor speculated that perhaps Intronis’s venture capitalists and financial backers were seeking faster growth to accelerate a potential company sale or IPO. Each time we’ve spoken Plunkett has politely shot down that speculation.

“My mission here is clear; it is to build a great company,” said Plunkett. “That’s what the board wants me to do. We think the MSP market is rocking.” One proof point: Plunkett says the Intronis cloud storage system is growing about 1.5 percent per week in terms of storage consumed.

Why’s that? Plunkett insists that Intronis is “the easiest” cloud backup system for MSPs to deploy. “Our customers — MSPs — are spending less time managing backup and restore, which gives them more time for selling.” To reinforce his point, Plunkett says the MSP renewal rate for Intronis — measured by storage — is 97 percent of storage volume. Plus, MSPs typically increase their volume commitments by 50 percent to 100 percent at renewal, he added.

Thinking Team

I asked Plunkett a few times about his management style and milestones in the past year. He kept shifting the spotlight to the Intronis team. “It’s gotta be the team; it’s clearly not me.” His proof points: Intronis has more than doubled headcount in R&D while also bolstering tech support, sales and marketing.

Moreover, Intronis team members have shifted into new roles amid the company growth. Co-founder Neal Bradbury, for instance, previously ran both tech support and hosting. But now Bradbury focuses entirely on data operations and IT, while VP Rick Burnett joined the company to take on the tech support role.

Meanwhile, Intronis has hired Smitty Kirsten to lead user interface design. Kirsten previously held top user design positions at Intuit and EMC. Plunkett’s key point: Intronis believes its cloud user interface has a lead over the competition, Smitty will help to maintain or extend that lead.

While Plunkett preaches teamwork, the Intronis team seems to respect Plunkett’s management style. ”This is what Kent is good at,” said Ferrari. “He’s grown companies from very small to very large. He creates a mission and a culture that cultivates teamwork. Plus, he puts processes in place to ensure quality.”

The R&D Process

Intronis recently updated its cloud storage service with a so-called Fall 2011 release. I asked Plunkett if launch cycles raise stress levels within the halls of Intronis. His reply: An adjusted development process — involving three major releases a year — ensures plenty of time for Intronis developers to polish the system and kill software bugs before each upgrade debuts.

Intronis has a hard stop on new coding/new features roughly 60 to 90 days before each launch. “That gives us 60 to 90 days to be in beta and harden the software. We have 10 QA [quality assurance] people to really pound the product.”

Maintaining Focus vs. Rivals

Plunkett didn’t mention any rivals by name. But he kept reinforcing an intensely focused business strategy. It involves:

• North America: Intronis is maintaining a focus on product R&D — purely for MSP use — to drive dominance in North America. “There’s signifiant upside inside North America for the foreseeable future,” he said. Avoiding the temptation to go global right now. Yes, Intronis has MSP partners in roughly two-dozen countries. But it’s not part of an intense business push. That international push will potentially be explored around 2013.
• Serving MSPs: Delivering reliability, focus and serviceability for the MSP. ”We’re reinvesting every dime we have back into making sure our system is designed for MSPs.”
• Embracing Mobile — In Stages: This is a two-part strategy. Near term, Intronis plans to make sure MSPs can use their own mobile devices to manage cloud storage. Longer term, Intronis will explore how to help MSPs potentially manage storage across customers’ tablets and smart phones. But right now, Plunkett said, he thinks that market opportunity is a bit too early.
• Thinking Long-Term: Plunkett said Intronis does not need to raise more cash, but the company’s financial backers stand ready to assist if Intronis wanted to pursue additional capital. “When your product is growing like crazy like ours, you don’t have a financing problem. We’ve got the potential to be a large, great company.” And that company, he said, doesn’t necessarily need to IPO.

Reality Check

On the one hand, I’m impressed with the simplicity of Plunkett’s intensely focused strategy. On the other, I want to be careful not to hype the strategy — which also involves its share of risks. Some reality checks:

1. Revenues and Rivals: In 2010, Intronis apparently had about $5.9 million in revenues, according to the Inc. 5000 list. Assuming roughly 50 percent growth in 2011, Intronis’s annual revenues will be about $9 million to $10 million this year. Impressive… but I suspect there are dozens of cloud storage and online backup companies that currently generate between $1 million and $10 million in annual revenues so this game is far from over. Note: The revenue figures I’ve mentioned are educated guesses and they could be off the mark; Intronis is privately held and does not have to disclose revenue figures.

2. Profits: What type of cash flow does Intronis generate? What about EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and the net income? It’s impossible to say since the company is private.

3. Focus: Sometimes, a laser-like focus can be a double-edged sword. By selling entirely through MSPs, mostly in North America, Intronis could overlook key direct sales or international opportunities that rivals exploit. I’m all for channel-friendly sales models. But I’m also realistic: There are multiple scenarios where Intronis potentially wins the North America MSP battle, but loses the global online backup war.

4. Mobile: Generally speaking, I agree with Plunkett’s reasoning in the mobile market. Right now, MSPs do want to use their own tablets to manage cloud applications. On the flip side, it may be a bit early for MSPs to manage customer storage across customers’ mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Still, I think that tipping point is nearly here. And I believe some rival cloud storage companies already help MSPs to address customers’ mobile device management needs in the market.

Next Moves

Where is Intronis heading next? It’s safe to expect plenty of clues during this week’s Tigerpaw User Conference in Dallas, plus upcoming events hosted by ASCII, ConnectWise and more.

News Facts:

• Zmags, the leading provider of rich media mobile and social merchandising, today announced it ranked number 70 on Deloitte’s 2011 Technology Fast 500™ ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America.
• Zmags grew 1730 percent from 2006-2010.
• Serving more than 3,000 of the world’s most progressive brands in the retail, luxury and consumer products industries, Zmags’ on-demand merchandising platform enables its customers to mobilize their merchandise and strengthen brand value across tablets, websites, mobile devices and social media.
• Chief Executive Officer Michael Schreck credits Zmags’ 1730 percent revenue growth to the measurable and dramatic ROI the company delivers.
• Overall, 2011 Technology Fast 500™ companies achieved revenue growth ranging from 134 percent to 70,211 percent from 2006 to 2010, with an average growth of 1,736 percent.

Supporting Quote:

“By helping companies create highly immersive brand experiences that promote product discovery, the Zmags platform is driving as much as a 500 percent increase in page views, 100 percent increase in conversions, and more than 40 percent lift in order sizes,” said Schreck. He added, “Mobile, tablet and social commerce are creating enormous opportunity for companies to engage their customers and strengthen their brands much more deeply than websites can on their own. Zmags is enabling our customers to monetize that experience – and they’re seeing the results translate to their bottom line.”

About Deloitte’s 2011 Technology Fast 500™

Technology Fast 500, which was conducted by Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP, provides a ranking of the fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies – both public and private – in North America. Technology Fast 500 award winners are selected based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth from 2006 to 2010. In order to be eligible for Technology Fast 500 recognition, companies must own proprietary intellectual property or technology that is sold to customers in products that contribute to a majority of the company’s operating revenues. Companies must have base-year operating revenues of at least $50,000 USD or CD, and current-year operating revenues of at least $5 million USD or CD. Additionally, companies must be in business for a minimum of five years, and be headquartered within North America.

About Zmags

Zmags provides its on-demand rich media merchandising and customer analytics platform to the world’s most progressive brands. With 3,000 customers worldwide, Zmags is the global leader in helping retailers, luxury brands, and consumer product manufacturers drive product discovery and inspire purchase by creating a deeply immersive online, social and mobile shopping experience that increases conversion rates, order sizes and customer retention. CommercePro from Zmags enables retailers and brands to harness the power of online, mobile and social channels by bringing commerce transaction capability directly into the digital merchandising environment — whether a consumer is using a tablet, website, smartphone or social site. Zmags is headquartered in Boston, Mass. with European offices in London and Copenhagen. For more information about Zmags, please visit www.zmags.com.

Instructure™ (www.instructure.com) has launched a new partner program for companies who share a common vision of helping improve education through technology.

Instructure invites these companies to leverage the Canvas platform and open APIs by becoming official Instructure partners. The program launches today with a number of partners, including Cengage Learning as a Premier partner and WiZIQ and EQUELLA as Certified partners.

“There are so many incredible technologies that make up the ecosystem in this industry, and Instructure wants to keep the ecosystem open,” said Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure. “Instructure is an open company with open source code, an open architecture and open APIs.”

The partner program offers three opportunities for companies to partner with Instructure. The first is the Community program. It is designed for those that want to work with the Canvas Community Edition and who want a low barrier to participate. Partners receive an API key, API documentation and forum support.

The second opportunity for partnership is the Instructure Certified Partner program. For these partners, Instructure will certify the integration work and develop joint marketing initiatives. WiZIQ and EQUELLA have had their integration work certified and are recommended by Instructure as tools to use within Canvas to improve learning.

“Instructure has taken an incredibly progressive view of the LMS as a teaching and learning tool. WizIQ is thrilled to be a partner and make its virtual classroom available to Instructure Canvas users,” said Chris Dawson, director of Business Development at WizIQ. “Instructure has made the process very straightforward and Canvas’ open architecture and engineering support has simplified our development and integration efforts.”

Premier partners are those companies that want a customized partnership with Instructure. Both companies dedicate a significant investment of time and both contribute to making the integration a success.

“We are constantly seeking ways to improve the teaching and learning experience through improved integration of technology and content in the classroom,” said William Rieders, executive vice president of Global Strategy & Business Development at Cengage Learning. “Through our relationship with Instructure, we will deliver innovative approaches to solving some of the challenges of using technology to deliver instruction to customers using the Canvas platform.”

Instructure has grown rapidly over the past 10 months, adding more than 70 customers to the Canvas platform. Recently Brown University and New Mexico State University announced they have chosen Canvas for their institutions’ learning platform. For more information on partnering with Instructure, please visit www.instructure.com/partners.

About Instructure:

Instructure is a technology company that is focused on improving education. Founded in 2008 by two Computer Science graduate students, Instructure built Canvas — the only open source learning management system and the only LMS native to the cloud. Instructure now services over 75 institutions in higher education and K-12. Investors include OpenView Ventures Partners, EPIC Ventures and TomorrowVentures.