VMTurbo and Acronis, a provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, announced a new technology partnership that brings together virtualization monitoring and high performance backup and recovery for VMware vSphere environments.

The recently announced Acronis vmProtect 6 integrates its backup and recovery with real time monitoring and reporting from VMTurbo Community Edition, which is freely available from VMTurbo.

The joint solution combines fast, affordable, simple backup and recovery with real time monitoring and alerting that allows administrators to:

* Monitor both system performance and backup performance from a single dashboard.

* Accurately monitor backup and system performance in real time, enabling immediate response to failure alerts in order to maintain high performance levels.

* Provide early warnings of failures within vStorage, minimizing the risk of data loss.

“The ability to share information between the products in a single dashboard increases the awareness of potential failures, allowing administrators to act before they reach crisis,” says Izzy Azeri, GM and Senior VP, Americas at Acronis. “VMTurbo Community Edition offers a premium enhancement to Acronis vmProtect 6 customers at no extra cost.”

Acronis has launched a fast and simple-to-use backup and disaster recovery solution for VMware customers. Acronis vmProtectTM 6 has been engineered exclusively for VMware vSphereTM servers (v4.0, 4.1 or later) using ESX and ESXi hypervisors. It provides businesses with a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage disaster recovery solution for agentless back up and quick recovery of their VMware virtual environments.

Priced at US$499 per CPU and with unlimited P2V (physical to virtual) migrations, Acronis vmProtect 6 represents an affordable backup, migration and disaster recovery solution for the growing number of businesses moving to a VMware virtualized server environment.

Bill Taylor-Mountford, President, Asia Pacific, Acronis said, “Protecting VMware servers should be neither complex nor costly. By using a solution that speaks directly to VMware requirements, businesses can accelerate their virtualization adoption. IT managers need never question the status, availability or recovery time of their virtual data again.”

Jonathan Couvaras, Technical & Pre-Sales Support, Datastor Australia, a beta tester of the product said, “Acronis vmProtect 6 is very simple to use and set up. With built-in deduplication, agent-less backups, support for a windows only agent (no need to install an agent on the VMWare host if you prefer), I can reduce hardware needs and storage space costs. I particularly liked the ability to mount your backup as a VM directly from vmProtect, no conversion required, and it’s all done in a matter of seconds! The solution is quick, agile and cost-effective.”

Backups should just work. They should not require hours and hours of management each week. That’s what Ted Roller told Channel Pro-SMB when he sat down for his first interview with us since becoming vice president of channel development at Intronis.

Intronis is a channel-only company aimed at SMB clients and the VARs that service them. “We’re built around several principles,” says Roller. “One of them is that small businesses should be afforded the opportunity to back up their data with the same kind of integrity and value that a large enterprise is able to take advantage of because of dollars and scope.”

Another principle of Intronis is what Roller’s team calls MPG, or “Man-hours Per Gig.” Roller says he understands how valuable time is to the managed service provider (MSP). He says Intronis develops its products and services in order to “lower the amount of time that an MSP has to spend managing backup for its customers on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.”

APPEALING TO NON-MSP RESELLERS
With the latest iteration of its cloud-based backup services due out this fall, Intronis is hoping to attract resellers who might otherwise not consider themselves MSPs. The key, Roller suggests, is in how these non-MSP resellers perceive cloud-based backup solutions.

Roller points out that the first priority needs to be the relationship that’s maintained with the SMB client. “If you deliver value and continue to enhance your relationships doing quarterly business reviews and being part of the solution, then you’re really not an MSP; your’re an IT provider with cloud-based deliverables and maybe some managed deliverables.”

What the cloud provides VARs, Roller says, is a means of delivering solutions in a more effective fashion without “having to build the back office for every solution.” Channel pros, Roller explains, can expand their “repertoire of deliverables” to have a broader impact on the relationships they maintain with SMBs by offering low-impact, cloud-based managed services.

“For the past 20 years, all we’ve been trying to do is figure out how to get data backed up into a mobile format and get it off-site,” Roller says. “Well, cloud-based backup is the ultimate evolution of that process.”

He says the Intronis cloud-based backup and recovery service enables VARs to wade lightly into managed services without having to spend hours and hours of time.

“It creates a monthly recurring revenue stream for you and establishes the beginnings of a managed services practice or a cloud-based services practice, depending on how you want to frame it and built it. You can also layer additional capabilities, like those provided via RMM, or hosted email, or the millions of things that exist out there in the cloud.”

SELLING MANAGED CLOUD-BASED SERVICES
The question is: How to sell the service to SMBs?

“All resellers have to do is wrap the word ‘cloud’ around an online backup solution and explain it to their customers,” says Roller. “The way Intronis backup works, it touches a lot of the HIPPA compliance regulations.”

Healthcare and educational institutions, where compliance laws are prominent, make good candidates for cloud-based backup and recovery offerings. “Professional services, like healthcare, legal and accounting, and education are verticals where we are very strong.”

MAKING THE TRANSITION
To help VARs enter into the lightweight managed services field, Intronis offers training, branding, and support. It starts with the Customer Success program.

The Customer Success program is offered for 60 days, beginning at signup. “We know that the more our MSPs know about the products, the more successful they’re going to be,” Roller says. “For those first 60 days, VARs get an account rep with a strong amount of expertise.”

In addition, VARs gain access to training programs and are provided access to private-label website and agent branding.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, has announced that City of Coldwater Board of Public Utilities (CBPU) in Michigan has selected Exinda’s solutions to improve Internet services to its residential and business subscribers providing faster access speeds for video and other bandwidth-intensive applications.

In a release, Arthur W. Plato, Internet Engineer at CBPU, said, “Our first priority is to provide our customers with the fastest and most reliable Internet connections we can deliver. Over the last few years, the volume of video downloads from sites such asYouTube (News – Alert).com has risen significantly.”

According to Plato, without making a complete change in the infrastructure, the company wanted to improve the delivery of video and other traffic on the network.

Exinda’s 8760 WAN Optimization appliances were selected by CBPU. Up to 5 GBs of traffic and up to 100,000 simultaneous users can be supported by these appliances. The impact of video traffic on the WAN is reduced and the performance of video applications is significantly improved with the single-sided caching feature, Exinda Edge Cache. Exinda Edge Cache is supported by the ExOS 6.1 which has been incorporated in the Exinda 8760.

Plato said, “The Exinda Edge Cache offers precisely the capabilities we were looking for from a WAN Optimization solution. It allows us to offer improved download times for video traffic, while reducing the amount of bandwidth consumed. The result is a better user experience and happier subscribers.”

Single-sided caching of Internet-based content is possible with the Exinda Edge Cache. The content can include web objects, videos and software updates. A superior user experience is provided as each branch office or data center has an Exinda WAN Optimization appliance. This will also reduce the WAN utilization costs. Web objects are cached at the network edge with the Exinda Edge Cache when they are downloaded from the Internet.

OpenView Venture Partners today announced that Chuck Linn, professional services expert, will join the firm as a Senior Advisor.

Chuck will join the firm as a member of OpenView Labs, the strategic and operational consulting group for its portfolio companies. This essential addition will help propel OpenView’s capability for building and supporting professional service initiatives. Chuck will primarily work as a consultant, coaching OpenView’s companies on best practices for professional services. He will also provide advice and support to the investment team when evaluating new companies.

“The OpenView Labs team is happy to welcome Chuck Linn as our Senior Advisor for the Labs team. Chuck’s experience and track record are impressive. I know that Chuck will provide immense value to our portfolio in the area of professional services,” said Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs.

Chuck is a results-oriented executive with over 30 years of combined experience spanning technology-enabled business solutions, change and organizational management including P&L management ($10 to $250+ Million), Sales management ($10 to $250+ Million bookings) and practice & initiative leadership. He currently is the President of C.J. Linn Enterprises, where he provides executive-level consulting and assistance to high technology and small businesses. He has acted as an interim COO and Professional Services Leaders for several expansion stage software companies. Prior to C.J. Linn Enterprises, Chuck was Vice President of Enterprise Services, Oracle Practice at Hewlett-Packard Company. Chuck has spent over 10 years of his career working as a Group Vice President for Oracle Corporation. While at Oracle, Chuck re-structured the business to focus on implementation of Oracle applications and re-crafted go to market/sales strategies around six sales channels to build strong License and partner relationships in addition to increasing margins from negative to the high 20s%.

“There are several key objectives of the professional services organizations within an expansion stage software companies – building strong customer references for the product; protecting the product and becoming a software enabler; striving to productize your solutions into the product; and building repeatable engagements. I am looking forward to continuing to work with OpenView portfolio companies and building best practices around services,” said Chuck Linn.

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. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

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.

News Facts:

• Zmags, the global leader in rich media merchandising and analytics solutions with more than 3,000 customers worldwide, today announced that W. Sean Ford is joining the company as COO and CMO.
• Ford will oversee global marketing strategy and operations, product management, customer support and corporate recruiting for Zmags, reporting to Zmags’ President and CEO Michael Schreck.
• As former vice president of Oracle’s Global Business Unit Marketing and as CMO of Syncsort, Ford brings more than 17 years of global business marketing and retail expertise that will support Zmags’ mission to provide the world’s most progressive marketers with the ability to deliver e-commerce-enabled, rich media experiences to their customers, and to monetize their brands.
• Ford and Schreck are reuniting after their successful partnership as co-founders of Upromise.
• Prior to joining Zmags, Ford served as the CMO of Syncsort, where he was the leader in global marketing strategy and execution, marketing communications, product marketing, partner and channel marketing, customer marketing, and education and training. He has also held the position of vice president, Global Business Unit Marketing at Oracle, where he was responsible for global marketing and strategy for Oracle’s vertical industries, including retail.
• Ford holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated with a BA from Williams College.

 

Supporting Quotes:

• “Sean is a proven world-class marketer and leader, and I know he will make a massive contribution to our continuing global growth,” said Schreck. “Sean’s deep expertise in the retail software industry, combined with his marketing and overall business savvy, make him a significant addition to our executive team.”
• “Harnessing and integrating the potential of mobile, social, and tablet commerce without compromising the brand experience is the next frontier of opportunity for retailers, e-commerce executives and marketing professionals,” said Ford. “Zmags is well positioned – both in terms of talent and technology – to lead the next wave of mobile merchandising solutions, and I am thrilled to be a part of the Zmags team.”

 

About Zmags

Zmags Corp is the global leader in SaaS-based rich media merchandising and analytics. With more than 3,000 of the world’s leading brands in the retail, fashion, e-commerce and consumer products industries, Zmags enables its customers to mobilize their merchandizing and capture the value

What: AgilePalooza is a community event presented by VersionOne. Meant to be a fun, low cost event linking internationally recognized coaches and trainers with the local software community, AgilePalooza is a day of collaboration, education and advancement of agile methods.

For $89 attendees receive a full day of agile learning, lunch and a choice of participating in one of two tracks; Practicing Agile or Planning Agile. These tracks offer topics ideal for those newer to agile as well as more experienced practitioners.

Where: AgilePalooza Washington, D.C. will be held at:

Marriott Tysons Corner
8028 Leesburg Pike
Tysons Corner, VA 22182
Phone: (703) 734-3200

When: September 16, 2011

Who: AgilePalooza D.C. has secured a line-up of experienced and talented agile experts and educators, including:

Sanjiv Augustine is an industry-leading agile and lean expert. He has assisted leading clients adopt agile methods over the past decade. He is the author of several publications including Transitioning to Agile Project Management: A Roadmap for the Perplexed, The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery and the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005); and the founder and moderator of the Yahoo! Agile Project Management discussion group. Sanjiv is also a founder and advisory board member of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Agile Forum Steering Committee. As an in-the-trenches practitioner, he has personally managed Agile projects varying in size from five to over one hundred people, trained thousands of agile practitioners via public classes and conference presentations, and coached numerous project teams. For more information, see Sanjiv’s website: www.sanjivaugustine.com.

Mike Cox is a Senior Consultant for Net Objectives. Previously at Lockheed Martin Corporation, he was responsible for raising the performance level of the 7000+ Control Account Managers (CAM) across the corporation. His accomplishments included the identification, training, process improvement, and career development of CAMs from all programs and functions across the Lockheed Martin enterprise. Mike is an engineering subject matter expert specializing in agile software development and in lean process improvement.

Steve Paro is currently an agile and product Consultant for VersionOne. He comes to the agile life cycle management tool company with vast experience as an independent agile coach and trainer, working with clients nationwide to improve their understanding and application of agile principles and techniques. He has worked with dozens of scrum teams, helping organizations realize significant improvements in quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. As a trainer, Steve has trained hundreds of IT and development professionals on agile project management, requirements definition, process adoption and team best practices.

Ahmed Sidky is frequently referred to as, Dr. Agile, on account of developing a free online agile readiness assessment tool named Doctor Agile (www.doctoragile.com).
Along with many years of experience in software development, Ahmed has a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in value-based process frameworks for effective agile adoption. Ahmed’s work has gained popularity and respect in the agile community as a pragmatic approach for organizations of all sizes attempting to adopt agile. He is a frequent speaker at national and international agile conferences as well as the co-author of a new book on practical agile adoption titled Becoming Agile.

Other: For more information on AgilePalooza, or to register to attend, please visit:  http://www.AgilePalooza.com.

About VersionOne
VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools. By simplifying the planning and tracking of agile projects, we help teams deliver better software faster. Since 2002, companies such as AAA, Adobe, Boeing, bwin, Lilly, Lockheed Martin, NASDAQ, Qualcomm, Sabre and Siemens have turned to VersionOne. Today more than 30,000 teams from over 170 countries use VersionOne. Agile Made Easier @ VersionOne.com.

Please direct all press inquiries to:
Crystal Macaulay
PerkettPR for VersionOne
781.871.8860
[email protected]

eEye Digital Security, a provider of IT security and unifiedvulnerability management solutions, today announced that the Company closed its most recent quarter with a 70% increase in new business revenue over the same period in 2010, resulting in its best first half in a decade.

Throughout 2011, eEye has committed to investing in Research and Development, with a focus on expanding the market leadership of its award-winning Retina vulnerability management solution suite. In this regard, the Company increased Research and Development investment by approximately 280% in the last two years. Even with these investments, the Company has remained operationally cash flow positive.

“We continue to see the IT security market responding very positively to the technology advancements we’ve offered thus far in 2011,” said Kevin Hickey, CEO, eEye. “In particular, the strong increase in new business revenue points to the fact that our solutions are meeting the complex needs of enterprises facing unprecedented challenges in vulnerability and compliance management. Also, the fact that we’ve been able to make crucial R&D investments, while maintaining the highest level of profitability in the company’s history, is a testament to the continued strength of our business. ”

A key milestone of eEye’s recent quarter was the release of Retina Community, a free vulnerability scanner that identifies vulnerabilities (including zero-day flaws), configuration issues, and missing patches across operating systems, applications, devices, and virtual environments. The tool has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of IT security professionals since April 2011.

Building on this strategy, the Company will soon release a free version of its Retina CS management console, which will offer automated, centralized application patching for Microsoft applications, Mozilla/Firefox, and Adobe’s Distiller, Elements, Reader, Flash, and Shockwave. This will be the first time that the IT security industry has seen such a robust combination of vulnerability scanning and remediation provided as a free, community offering.

Additionally, the company continues to grow and is actively hiring across all organizations. Get more information about eEye careers.

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, prevent their exploit, and build new protections into our solutions. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including the two largest vulnerability management installations in the world, rely on eEye to protect against the latest known and zero-day vulnerabilities. More at eeye.com.