Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions incorporating Unified Performance Management, today announced that the City of Coldwater Board of Public Utilities (CBPU) has selected Exinda’s solutions to improve the performance of its Internet services to its residential and business subscribers. With the Exinda solutions in place, CBPU Internet service subscribers now experience faster access speeds for video and other bandwidth-intensive applications, without compromising the performance of other applications.

“Our first priority is to provide our customers with the fastest and most reliable Internet connections we can deliver,” said Arthur W. Plato, Internet Engineer, Coldwater Board of Public Utilities. “Over the last few years, the volume of video downloads from sites such as YouTube.com has risen significantly. We chose Exinda WAN Optimization solutions so that we could improve the delivery of video and other traffic on the network without the need for an overhaul of our infrastructure.”

CBPU selected Exinda’s 8760 WAN Optimization appliances, which can support up to 5 GBs of traffic and up to 100,000 simultaneous users. The Exinda 8760 incorporates the ExOS 6.1 software, which supports Exinda Edge Cache, a single-sided caching feature that significantly improves the performance of video applications, while reducing the impact of video traffic on the WAN.

 “The Exinda Edge Cache offers precisely the capabilities we were looking for from a WAN Optimization solution,” said Plato. “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.”

The Exinda Edge Cache enables single-sided caching of Internet-based content, including web objects, videos and software updates with a single Exinda WAN Optimization appliance at the branch office or data center, enabling a superior user experience and reducing WAN utilization costs. With the Exinda Edge Cache, web objects are cached at the network edge when they are downloaded from the Internet. These objects can then be delivered to the users on the corporate local area network much faster, providing a better user experience. By caching these web objects in the local office, organizations can drive down the network traffic consumed by each office, which directly reduces network costs.

“By eliminating the repetitive download of content over the WAN, the Exinda Edge Cache dramatically improves the speed and performance of internet applications,” said Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s VP of marketing. “Our customers have seen as much as 80% reduction in http traffic over the WAN, and more than 35% reduction in video and other content. By reducing the consumption of valuable WAN resources, organizations can maximize their existing network spend and use the savings to fund innovative projects that further reduce cost.”

About Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The company has helped over 2,000 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.

By 2016, companies are on pace to spend the same amount of money that they do on television today on interactive marketing.

According to a new report from Forrester Research, advertisers will shell out $77 billion on the promotional tactic. They will also increase their budgets for search, mobile and email marketing, display advertising and social media over the next five years. Those channels will account for 35 percent of advertising expenditures by 2016.

Shar VanBoskirk, the co-author of the report, noted that interactive marketing is gaining “legitimacy” among the suite of marketing ploys, and is moving from the experimental stage to a real tactic for “creating rich customer relationships.”

Forrester also expects that paid search and search engine optimization marketing will continue to be a major force in interactive marketing, but that its share will shrink as other techniques become more popular.

Ad agencies report that they’ve seen higher demand for interactive marketing. One such firm is ExactTarget, which specializes in combining various promotional channels. The company announced it had seen 180 percent growth between 2007 and 2010.

ExactTarget’s CEO cited the demand to “connect with consumers in real time across email, mobile, social media and the web” as a contributing factor to its success.

A first-of-its-kind worm is currently spreading in the wild via Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), security firms have warned.

But experts don’t believe the malware will become widespread.

Dubbed “Morto,” the worm was discovered on Saturday but was likely propagating for several days before that, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told SCMagazineUS.com on Monday. Morto is unique because it is the first worm to spread via RDP, a technology developed by Microsoft that enables users to connect to their computer remotely.

“It will enter history books as the first worm that used this vector,” Hypponen said.

The worm, targeting Windows workstations and servers, allows attacks to remotely control an affected system, Hypponen said. In addition, infected machines become part of a botnet that can be used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

To be vulnerable, a machine would need to be enabled for remote use, he said. Most importantly, a user would have to be using a weak password for this connection.

Morto attempts to spread by scanning infected computers’ local networks for machines that have RDP enabled. When a Remote Desktop server is found, the malware then attempts to use dozens of weak passwords, such as “123,” “admin” or “password,” to login as the administrator.

Upon successfully signing in, the malware then copies itself onto the target machine. Infected servers generate a substantial amount of outgoing traffic for port 3389/TCP as the malware scans IP ranges to find other machines to infect.

Marc Maiffret, CTO of vulnerability assessment and management firm eEye Digital Security, in a blog post Sunday, called Morto “silly” and said it demonstrates that many organizations still fail to cover security basis such as enforcing the use of strong passwords.

“If there are companies in this day and age being compromised by Morto, we have bigger problems to worry about than the ‘APT‘ or Stuxnet,” he wrote.

Morto has so far impacted a few thousand servers, Hypponen said. It is, however, nowhere near as fast-moving as other worms, such as Blaster, he added.

Microsoft on Sunday released details about the worm and labeled it as “severe,” its highest alert level, reserved for the most widespread and malicious programs.

“It’s important to remember that this malware does not exploit a vulnerability, but instead relies on weak passwords,” Pete Voss, senior response communications manager at Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, said in a statement sent to SCMagazineUS.com on Monday. “We encourage people to use strong passwords to help protect their systems.”

Past infectious worms, such as Conficker, required a vulnerability.

Infection rates also will be slowed anti-virus solutions, Hypponen said.

Faith Community Hospital recently joined the ranks of a select group.  The 41-bed provider attested to the meaningful use of electronic health records, becoming one of only 100 hospitals to do so as of the end of July, according to a report from the Health IT Policy Committee, an industry group that works with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC-HIT).

The Jacksboro, Texas-based hospital is leveraging the ChartAccess® Comprehensive EHR from Prognosis to quickly tap into the clinical and operational benefits associated with such technology – and to reap the financial rewards emanating from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  With the contract signed in October of 2010, Faith began implementation in January of 2011, went live in March and then attested on June 5 – and has already received its share of the $27 billion available under the EHR incentive fund. Only 66 hospitals had received incentive monies by the end of July. Many other hospitals that have already attested have had EHRs up and running for several years.

“I give a lot of credit to my staff for understanding the urgency and making sure the EHR was implemented in the time frame set forth,” said Frank L. Beaman, CEO at Faith Community.  “Prognosis was also a big help as their staff members took part in every weekly user group meeting and worked hand-in-hand with us every step of the way.”

To qualify under the Medicare program, Faith demonstrated 90 consecutive days of meaningful use of certified EHR technology through the submission of data for 14 mandatory core set objectives and five out of 10 menu set objectives as well as required clinical quality measures via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Attestation System.

To achieve this feat, Faith relied on the Prognosis EHR to overcome the cost, speed of implementation, and usability obstacles commonly cited as impediments to electronic records success. A shared web-native EHR system delivered via a “cloud computing” model, ChartAccess software applications are made available as a service over an encrypted health information network. Intuitive and easy-to-use, the system offers built in analytics and health information exchange (HIE) capabilities, which can help hospitals provide consistent, high-quality patient care.

A meaningful use dashboard in the ChartAccess system enabled Faith to easily monitor progress in relation to required meaningful use measures. On-going technical and operational support from Prognosis made it possible for Faith to quickly realize the government’s Stage 1 requirements.

“The concept of electronic health records makes great sense for the future of medicine. The details involved with implementing EHRs, however, can be highly complicated and hospitals face the challenge of clearing all the hurdles before they can start to tap into the clinical and operational benefits,” Beaman said. “That is why this is such a significant achievement for our hospital.”

The Prognosis EHR serves as the hub of Faith Community’s computerization initiatives. The solution is interfaced with a billing system, which makes it possible to seamlessly connect clinical and financial data, as well as an outpatient clinical system, which enables physicians to seamlessly tap into and share information generated in their ambulatory facilities.

“Our technology is making it possible for community hospitals to challenge the commonly held assumption that it takes years to get a comprehensive information technology initiative up and running. We have had several hospitals leverage our innovative web-native application in the cloud to go from project kick off to go live in less than 120 days – and then to optimize the use of the system to meet Stage 1 meaningful use requirements,” said Ramsey Evans, CEO of Prognosis. “In addition, because our system is so flexible, organizations are finding it easy to experience even greater efficiencies and enhanced care by leveraging connectivity across the enterprise.”

About Prognosis Health Information Systems

Prognosis Health Information Systems, Inc., Houston, aims to improve the quality and safety of patient care through ChartAccess, a certified Comprehensive EHR. Designed to be fully operational in less than six months at a predictable, affordable cost, the solution enables hospitals to meet meaningful use and improve patient outcomes by leveraging built-in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) milestone and quality measure tracking functionality. PHIS uses 21st-Century technologies to offer small community hospitals a pure browser-based system that can run on-premise or in the cloud. For more information, go to www.prognosishis.com.

Data protection vendor Acronis has launched Acronis vmProtect 6, a new low-cost and simple to use backup and disaster recovery solution for VMware customers. It has been engineered specifically for VMware vSphere virtual servers (v4.0, 4.1 or later) using ESX and ESXi hypervisors, and provides a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage disaster recovery solution to back up and quickly recover VMware virtual environments.

“We’ve been in the virtualization industry for years, protecting over 100,000 virtual servers worldwide,” said Izzy Azeri, senior vice president & general manager, Americas, at Acronis. “We ve taken that core technology, added to it and optimized it for VMware.” The product is new, despite the 6 in the branding, Azeri said.

Azeri said the decision to produce a product specifically for VMware was dictated by the numbers. VMware still holds the lion s share of the virtualization market, with 85%, although Gartner projects that will decline to 75% by 2012. Azeri also pointed to an Enterprise Strategy Group study indicating that many customers will consider a new backup vendor specifically for virtualization.

“40% of those who have already deployed virtualization said that they would use a new backup vendor for virtualization,” Azeri said. “That rises to 54% for those that haven t already deployed. Virtualization is clearly a time when customers will consider changing vendors.”

That trend is even stronger in the SMB space, where Acronis does much of its business, Azeri said.

“The SMB and enterprise are a little different when it comes to virtualization,” he said. “We see SMBs moving to production more quickly than the enterprises, because the enterprises do more testing, and are more complex.”

Azeri said that vmProtect 6 s simplicity will give it appeal among VMware partners and facilitate their deeper drive into the market.

“It is having high synergy with VMware partners,” he said. “It leverages VMware APIs and has little overhead on the platform. It’s also easy and fast, and literally deploys in three minutes. Everything is managed through a Web based interface, so it can be managed remotely, even on a smartphone.”

The quick install is facilitated by the solution being an agentless Linux virtual appliance, and Azeri pointed out that this means no incremental investment is needed to get this going, and no additional licenses are needed.

Acronis vmProtect 6 can run a virtual machine directly from a backup image, without having to do a full restore, actual recovery times can take less than a minute. It also offers LAN-free backup from the server right to storage, so reduces traffic on the network, and can also back up directly to the Acronis cloud, to provide a secondary DR site.

It offers both image and file-level recovery options, which allows users to restore precisely the data that is needed. The granular nature of the application makes it possible to select individual volumes to backup and, for even faster backups, users can analyze the file system to avoid backing up unused blocks and exclude individual files and folders such as temporary or page files.

Data deduplication and compression capabilities are part of the standard package. These further reduce the time taken to back up and recover as well as cut storage costs. In addition, for added security, backups can be encrypted using industry-standard 256 bit AES algorithms.

Acronis vmProtect 6 is priced at $499 per CPU, and with unlimited P2V (physical to virtual) migrations.

The module works together seamlessly with SproutLoud’s direct mail and PURL (personalized URL) technology, enabling companies to develop branded cross media campaigns using a single application. It’s designed to handle many different types of campaigns, including individual orders, trigger based and drip marketing programs, and Auto Enroll ™ programs that use a single subscription to enlist participants in multi-touchpoint campaigns. Each type of campaign can be set up for acquisition or retention-based programs.

“We really want to offer the distributed marketing organizations that form our customer base the best range of integrated media options so they can test and optimize their marketing programs. Different markets respond best to different types of media, and we now offer brands and their local marketing partners the opportunity to reach their prospects and customers in the one their targets prefer,” stated Gary Ritkes, Managing Partner, Sales.

SproutLoud’s alliance with ExactTarget raises the response bar even higher, by providing clients the bandwidth, security and authentication processes to maximize delivery rates and ensure e-mail campaigns steer clear of SPAM filters to reach their intended targets.

“One of the key reasons companies partner with SproutLoud is the ability to maintain brand integrity across all of their local marketing programs,” Jared Shusterman, CEO and Managing Partner, commented. “ExactTarget’s existing methods and policies that meet SPAM requirements and ensure a company’s e-mail reputation and behavior is above reproach complements our goals as well as our clients’ interests.”

About SproutLoud
Headquartered in Sunrise, FL, SproutLoud helps companies manage their brands and messages in local-level marketing. SproutLoud’s web-based Marketing Resource Management (MRM) application provides robust marketing features in an easy to use interface, enabling local marketers to access the materials they need in the media of their choice, customize them, and reach their target audience with brand-controlled messaging.

SproutLoud solutions adapt easily for any local network, including sales channels, franchises, retail locations, dealer networks, VAR Programs, field employees/offices, and affiliates. Their platform manages brand compliance, increases speed to market, automates manual tasks, and provides robust reporting, empowering marketers with the resources of national brands and making local marketing work smarter.

Contact: Raleigh Susskind
rsuskind(at)sproutloud(dot)com
15431 S.W. 14th Street
Sunrise, FL 33326
Ph: 954.476.6211 x150