Ball State University has selected Exinda’s WAN optimization as a servicesolution to improve the user experience of the more than 20,000 students, faculty and administrators on its wide area network (WAN).

With Exinda solutions, the university’s IT team has improved visibility, reporting, and control of its network infrastructure. Moreover, it has also increased its bandwidth management capacity by 250 percent.

Ball State University selected Exinda’s 10060 series WAN optimization solution, which supports up to 20 Gbps worth of traffic and up to 250,000 users.

Recently, the university increased the bandwidth in its network to accommodate students and faculty who are increasingly accessing and sharing video applications across the network, said Christopher Cahoe, network engineer of Ball State University.

After a thorough review of available solutions, the university determined that Exinda offered the greatest throughput per dollar, and the quality of the product exceeded other solutions, Cahoe said. “In addition, the licensing structure offered by Exinda made sense to our business.”

The Exinda 10060 comes with the ExOS 6.1 software that supports Exinda Edge Cache, a single-sided caching feature. Company officials said that feature “significantly” improves the performance of video applications and also reduces the impact of video traffic on the WAN.

The integration of Exinda’s 10060 with the Ball State University network was completed in less than four hours. The integration has provided increased visibility and monitoring of application performance on the network.

Cahoe said that another benefit of the Exinda solution is its Unified Performance Management approach, which has provided visibility, control and optimization of the applications and users on our network, all with a single solution.

“With Exinda, we have the ability to support more users on our network, without the need for additional bandwidth upgrades,” Cahoe said.

Exinda is a global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. Earlier last month, the company announced the commercial launch of ExOS 6.1.

Students returning to class next week in the storm tattered Midwest will be welcomed with new computers, books and essential school supplies funded through a national social media and email campaign byDonorsChoose.org.

“When students come back to school Aug. 17, we want every Joplin teacher and student to enter a classroom that feels as familiar, warm and welcoming as it did before the tornadoes”

Powered by interactive marketing provider ExactTarget, the “We Lost Everything” campaign on Twitter, Facebook and email has already collected more than $135,000 for 300 classroom projects for the Joplin School District, a school system devastated by one of the largest tornadoes in the country’s history May 22, 2011.

“When students come back to school Aug. 17, we want every Joplin teacher and student to enter a classroom that feels as familiar, warm and welcoming as it did before the tornadoes,” said Katie Bisbee, chief marketing officer at DonorsChoose.org.

DonorsChoose.org is promoting the “We Lost Everything” campaign through emails to its more than 525,000 supporters, regular Tweets to its nearly 73,000 Twitter followers, and recurring Facebook updates for its 92,000 Facebook fans. Supporters, fans and followers can choose to support specific school projects and fill needs such as books, computers and more.

Named one of the world’s most innovative companies in February 2011 by Fast Company, DonorsChoose.org is a global network of more than 525,000 donors who gave roughly $30 million to support 60,000 classroom projects in 2010.

“Effective interactive marketing isn’t about whether email, Twitter, Facebook or the Web is better, it’s about creating a meaningful connection wherever a customer wants to interact,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “The success of the DonorsChoose campaign highlights the power of creating a seamless online experience and delivering relevant, engaging content in real time.”

DonorsChoose.org is among several national and international brands slated to speak at Connections ’11, ExactTarget’s annual user conference in Indianapolis. The conference, which runs Sept. 13 -15, will feature more than 50 breakout sessions ranging from cross-channel marketing best practices to case studies featuring results with campaigns across email, mobile, social media and the Web.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

Sheplers has been synonymous with western wear and cowboy boots since 1899. The retailer carries the world’s best-known western wear brands as well as over 2,000 pairs of cowboy boots in its 16 stores across the U.S. and through its extensive catalog offering. With so many products, Sheplers added its e-commerce channel early on, in 1998. Since then, the retailer has been a pioneer in agile e-commerce.

To have an efficient and profitable website, Sheplers needed to offer  customers promotions that were effective. To know which offers did and didn’t work, the company performed tests on its website, but testing in-house was proving to be more of a hassle than a best practice.

“We would actually create two different versions of the website,” explains Mark Hampton, COO of Sheplers. “I would create an ‘A’ version of the website and a ‘B’ version, and then measure those variables based on those versions of the website.”

The extra work was taking away from other operations Sheplers’ IT staff could focus on. So the retailer set out to find a solution that would be able to consistently and efficiently run tests on its website to obtain accurate statistics in order to improve conversion.

Multivariate Testing
Sheplers began working with Monetate, a provider of testing, targeting and personalization services for websites, to test and analyze promotions on its website. With Monetate, Sheplers is performing multivariate testing, which allows Sheplers to test multiple factors simultaneously.

One promotion Sheplers tested is free shipping. Using geo-targeting capabilities Sheplers saw website sales were lower in states where the retailer had more competition. Using the multivariate testing tool, Sheplers tested free shipping in under-performing states. The goal was to see if the offers produced a significant lift in conversion and top-line revenue while tracking net contribution to the bottom line.

Sheplers was able to test a wide range of shipping promotions, including dropping the shipping charges based on distance from the warehouse or competitors’ stores and offering free shipping on orders over $75 and $99 dollars. The test allowed some shoppers to get free shipping while showing different messages to shoppers in other areas.

Sheplers was able to see the effects of targeting immediately. After four days of testing the various offers, the Monetate dashboard showed a 57% increase to the top line and 48% increase in new customer acquisition within these tests. Since using the testing tool, Sheplers has seen a 3.33% increase in overall conversion rate.

“The way a company gets a 20% increase is 2% to 3% at a time,” explains Hampton. “If everything on your website is well-conceived and well-executed, you’re in a situation where you have to move the needle with these 2% and 3% earnings, and multivariate testing is really the only way to keep pushing that needle forward.”

Statistical Validity
In addition to making tests faster and more efficient, the testing tool gives Sheplers rich analysis of each test. It measures the percent of visitors to the site who make a purchase, the number of customer acquisitions, the rate of average order and other key performance indicators.

“Internally we were already doing a lot of these key performance indicators,” explains Hampton. “What Monetate brought to the table was statistical validity.”

According to Hampton, the key performance indicators help the company frame future tests. “One test worked very well to get items in the cart, but this test got things in the cart to convert better, so maybe I can take elements of both and put them together for this third test.

“Statistical validity tells you which key performance indicators you should really pay attention to on a test,” continues Hampton. “Otherwise, you just look at the average performance and you don’t know whether or not that is statistically valid and you might make the wrong assumption.”

Redeploying IT
Not only has the testing tool allowed Sheplers to perform tests more quickly and with rich analysis, but the company can redeploy the time and money spent on having its IT staff perform tests to execute what it learned from the testing.

“The amount of internal work to do these kinds of tests is greatly reduced, which means you do more tests,” says Hampton. “You learn faster and therefore you progress faster. Now we can take the dollars we were spending on testing and redeploy it to execute on our learnables.”

Sheplers continues to test and analyze promotions to present the best experience possible to its customers.

“We were a company who was already testing and analyzing our business in many ways,” says Hampton. “Monetate allows us to do more and do it faster.”

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, and Industrial Logic, a pioneer in true on-demand, self-paced eLearning products, today announced a strategic partnership to market Industrial Logic’s software engineering focused product offerings.

“We are happy to partner with VersionOne to provide our best-selling Agile eLearning products to their global community. VersionOne’s developers use Test-Driven Development, refactoring and other agile practices everyday as part of their core development process”

Since its launch in 2002, VersionOne has been committed to supporting leading-edge teams with best-in-class agile tools and education. Recognizing that engineering and technical practices are one of the key foundational elements for enabling truly agile organizations, VersionOne is excited to help bring Industrial Logic’s innovative courseware to a broader market to help ensure the overall success of enterprise agile adoptions.

Supporting Quote:

Robert Holler, President and CEO, VersionOne

“Agile development projects and organizations are fundamentally more successful with solid engineering practices and discipline,” states Robert Holler, CEO of VersionOne. “VersionOne’s enterprise development teams have found it difficult to affordably train their teams in TDD, refactoring and other best practices with traditional classroom training methods. Industrial Logic’s courses provide innovative self-paced, on-demand learning experiences that allow organizations to scale their engineering training efforts rapidly and cost effectively.”

Supporting Quote:

Joshua Kerievsky, founder and CEO, Industrial Logic

“We are happy to partner with VersionOne to provide our best-selling Agile eLearning products to their global community. VersionOne’s developers use Test-Driven Development, refactoring and other agile practices everyday as part of their core development process,” comments Joshua Kerievsky, founder and CEO of Industrial Logic. “We look forward to a productive partnership with VersionOne that will benefit practitioners of agile development.”

Skytap announced new cloud orchestration and configuration routing features. Seattle-based Skytap provides self-service cloud automation solutions to help companies move complex IT environments to the cloud. The company is venture-backed and consists of a number of experienced veterans from HP, Google, RealNetworks, Quantum and Microsoft.

With the new release of Skytap, development and test teams can easily replicate their in-house environments in the cloud while sharing server resources such as a Microsoft Team Foundation Server, an HP Application Life-cycle Management server or MySQL database.  Users can also easily orchestrate the start-up, shutdown and suspend sequence of virtual data centers that include shared server resources without requiring IT support.

“As cloud services mature, enterprises will expect the cloud to more closely mirror traditional data center processes,” said Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group. “To achieve this, cloud providers must offer sophisticated automation capabilities that drive new levels of agility and that lift the support burden from the IT team. End-users will benefit more from cloud services that automate the networking and workflow processes already used in their data center environments.”

Configuration Routing and Cloud Orchestration

Sytap’s configuration Routing features mimic a traditional server “hub/spoke” model in the cloud where users can connect any number of server configurations to a centralized server configuration and setup custom DNS services. With the Configuration Routing feature, development managers can automate this process utilizing a simple self-service user interface in the cloud. With the goal of getting rid of complicated scripts and automation software, Skytap’s orchestration feature enables users to specify the sequence and scheduling dependencies through the Skytap user interface.

“Enterprises are demanding the same type of automation and workflow processes they rely on in their physical data centers as part of their cloud deployments,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “With this release, Skytap empowers organizations with the same level of control and automation found in a traditional data center, while allowing them to benefit from the low cost and scalability of the cloud model.”

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, and LeanKit, maker of LeanKit Kanban, today announced a strategic partnership to offer an integrated solution providing sophisticated support for teams implementing Kanban.

Since its launch in 2002, VersionOne has led the market in supporting multiple agile methods in a single tool enabling broader organization-wide visibility and reporting. Through this partnership, VersionOne will offer an integrated solution delivering best-of-breed agile and Kanban lifecycle management.

This partnership will allow VersionOne to extend and enhance the core Kanban functionality within the VersionOne product to support teams needing more advanced Kanban workflow, analytics and reporting while allowing organizations to continue to benefit from VersionOne’s overall enterprise ALM solution.

Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget announced today that Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk will headline the final day of ExactTarget Connections ’11, the world’s largest interactive marketing conference.

“Stan Lee is pioneer who has revolutionized an entire industry by bringing iconic super heroes to life through his groundbreaking work at Marvel Comics”

Lee, who will discuss the power of creativity in business, joins previously announced conference speakers, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Best Buy Global Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, Best Buy Chief Technology Officer Robert Stephens, author Aron Ralston, Facebook Vice President Tom Arrix and eMarketer Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Geoff Ramsey.

“Stan Lee is pioneer who has revolutionized an entire industry by bringing iconic super heroes to life through his groundbreaking work at Marvel Comics,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “Stan’s personal story and his passion for creativity are a perfect addition to our lineup of world renowned speakers for Connections ’11.”

In addition to Lee, ExactTarget announced today that it has also added an Author Panel to the three-day event that is expected to attract marketers from around the globe. Authors slated to speak at Connections ’11 include:

• Chris Baggott, CEO and Cofounder, Compendium and author of Email Marketing by the Numbers
• Jay Baer, President, Convince and Convert and author of The Now Revolution
• C.C. Chapman, Founder of Digital Dads and co-author of Content Rules
• Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and co-author of Content Rules
• Simms Jenkins, Founder and CEO, BrightWave Marketing, and author of The Truth About Email Marketing
• Jim Kukral, Founder, DigitalBookLaunch.com and author of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money
• Trey Pennington, Author of Be the Hero
• Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute and author of Get Content, Get Customers
• Aaron Strout, Author of Location-Based Marketing for Dummies

Registration is available online at Connections ’11. Marketers who register before Aug. 10 will receive $200 off the $995 registration fee. Marketers attending Connections ’11 may also register for ExactTarget’s certification session Sept. 12 in Indianapolis. The day-long program offers registrants the opportunity to earn certification in three levels – Professional, Marketer and Partner. To register or to learn more, visit www.Connections2011.com.

Connections ’11 follows ExactTarget Connections ‘10, which welcomed more than 2,000 marketers to Indianapolis and featured a lineup of industry titans including Virgin Group Founder and Chairman Sir Richard Branson, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and a private concert from Grammy Award-winning band Train.