Synnex continues to build out its managed services business while confirming MSP veteran Amy Luby is no longer with the distributor. Here’s the update.

Earlier this week sources told MSPmentor that Luby and Synnex had parted ways. Luby is well-known within managed services circles, having previously launched a Master MSP before joining Synnex in 2010. Luby declined to comment but I suspect she’ll resurface in the managed services market or somewhere within the IT channel, given her recurring revenue experience.

Meanwhile, Synnex confirms that Amy Luby is no longer with the company. But the company has multiple SaaS and managed services veterans. And the parting of ways won’t impact Synnex’s focus on managed services, the company says.

“SYNNEX’s emphasis on providing managed services solutions for our partners remains steadfast,” said Bob Stegner, senior VP of marketing, North America at SYNNEX Corp.  “We have the most comprehensive portfolio of managed services for MSP’s large and small. Further, no managed service solution is more appropriate or more focused on supporting VAR’s in the mid-market and enterprise space.  SYNNEX is committed to leading in this space and will continue to invest in developing the right solutions for our partners.”

Synnex unveiled its latest managed services initiative in April 2011, building relationships with Autotask, Intronis, Level Platforms, Reflexion Networks and other software providers that work closely with MSPs and VARs focused on recurring revenues. The company discussed the effort at the Synnex Varnex conference, and attendees seemed genuinely intrigued.

In some ways, the Synnex effort countered ongoing initiatives at Ingram Micro, which spent recent years promoting Seismic services to MSPs and now Ingram Micro Cloud to the broader channel. Synnex added several new wrinkles to its own efforts, including a so-called freemium push to help MSPs onboard customers before up-selling them to additional services.

Whether they are cloud service outages or natural disasters, cloud computing can be both a nightmare or a savior to your IT organization: either it halts your business operation or loses your data, or it allows you to continue operate your business as workloads are switched to or backed up by physically safer data centers.

It’s coming soon, that day where we throw off the corded shackles and declare our independence from all things hard-wired. No longer will we have to sit at our desk to get email, be at home to get our phone calls or lounge in front of the TV just to watch American Idol. Mobile Dependence Day is fast approaching and ExactTarget is here to tell us all about it.

Subscribers, Fans and Followers #9, gives you the inside look at all things mobile and it does it with a sense of humor rarely seen in statistical works. Hey, they make their pie-charts out of actual pies. They also made the nifty graphic you see here (I’m just borrowing it.) Their point, is that the mobile phone is a modern-day Swiss Army knife. An easily pocketed tool that can get you out of almost any jam. Though, I don’t think you can use it to open a bottle top, but you can us it to pretend drink a glass of beer.

Within the space of fifteen years, we went from a fun gizmo that a few people had, to 89% of the US population over the age of 15. 41% is made up of smartphones and it’s expected to reach 50% by next year.

According to the report, people mostly use their phone to call people and text, 53% check email at least once a day but only 18% use it to browse the web. What might surprise you is that 17% used their smartphone to read a book and 16% watched a TV show. It really is the ultimate, multi-purpose tool.

Shopping on the Go

16% of smartphone users bought something as a result of a mobile marketing message. What’s funny is that 56% said that message came by email, which isn’t specific to mobile as they could have gotten the same message on their PC.

The one I can’t fathom is the 41% who said they bought in response to a text message. Surely these can’t be marketing texts. They must be referring to texts from a friend. “Check out these boots!” Click. Nice. Buy.

35% bought from a Facebook message and 32% bought through a shopping app.

There’s no longer any doubt. People will shop on their phones. It’s the modern equivalent of the Home Shopping Network, with its ability to grab hold when you’re bored. Terrible glare while you’re waiting for the bus. Time to buy those sunglasses you’ve been wanting.

Above all, what ExactTarget wants you to get out of this report, is that the independence we got by cutting the cord, is actually leading us deep into a new dependence on 4G, wifi, Android, iPad and the like. As a marketer, you can’t simply keep up, you have to find away to get ahead and make mobile work for your business.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization and application performance management solutions featuring Unified Performance Management (UPM), today announced the launch of Network Reporting Center (NRC). Network Reporting Center delivers comprehensive network wide reporting and long term historical trending and analytics, providing network managers with a complete view of their entire worldwide network.

Network Reporting Center is an advanced reporting solution that provides real-time troubleshooting and historical reporting of all of the applications on the WAN and on an organization’s Internet connections. NRC goes beyond the port and protocol reporting offered by other solutions, to show the actual applications and users consuming network resources. The NRC is offered as a cloud solution or as an on-site virtual appliance.

“Network managers often struggle to answer questions about network performance, such as why the network is slow, how are important business applications performing on the network, which ones are consuming all of the bandwidth, and how much bandwidth is being consumed by recreational applications,” said Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s vice president of marketing. “With NRC, network managers now have the tools to monitor overall network performance, analyze historical data to anticipate problems, identify key trends in performance, and address them before they impact the user experience.”

Once installed on the WAN, NRC collects network data from each location, including head office and branches, and consolidates the data into a single, centralized reporting dashboard. NRC provides granular, by-the-minute reporting in real time, as well as up to two years of historical data on the applications traversing the network.

“Exinda recognizes that reporting at the port layer is not sufficient for most network managers. With thousands of business and recreational applications running over common ports, it is impossible to control these applications without a comprehensive reporting solution that integrates easily with the existing network, with no additional hardware required,” added Suitor. “In addition powerful centralized reporting provides a global view into business-critical applications, WAN utilization, and network and application performance problems across your entire worldwide network.”

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 to reduce network operating costs and ensure consistent application performance over the WAN. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments today announced that it has made it easier for channel partners to penetrate the small business virtualization market.

In a campaign through joint channel partners, Acronis will offer incentives and marketing promotions to target small businesses wishing to migrate their data to virtualized environments.

According to a recent survey by Acronis¹, adoption of virtualization among small and mid-sized businesses is expected to increase by 50% this year. This represents a huge opportunity which Acronis and VMware are addressing through an expanding network of channel partners with go-to-market initiatives. Acronis is also offering increased margins of up to 30% for VMware projects and is looking to aggressively enlist more VMware resellers.

Acronis^® Backup & Recovery™ 10 Virtual Edition protects over 100,000 virtual machines across thousands of customers worldwide. In addition to backup and disaster recovery, the powerful, unlimited migration capabilities have allowed businesses of all sizes to seamlessly move nearly 1,000,000 servers between physical, virtual and cloud environments. The latest version of this solution, Acronis^® Backup & Recovery™ 11, shipped on June 21, 2011. Together with the industry-leading VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, including VMware vSphere^®, this new campaign brings Acronis and VMware solutions to channel partners who have not yet taken advantage of these solutions, as well as bringing additional benefits to existing resellers.

“Small business customers will benefit from a virtualization solution that includes VMware software and Acronis. Migration is one of the first areas a small business will tackle and the unlimited physical to virtual conversions provided by Acronis give you a lot of flexibility,” said Jason Schuerhoff from Sublime Solutions, a reseller for both VMware and Acronis. “With Acronis and VMware marketing their solutions together, it will be easier for us to reach and serve this growing market. Sublime Solutions have already seen great traction with VMware solutions and Acronis amongst our small business customers, these new financial incentives will make it easier for us to win new business.”

“Small businesses are rapidly embracing virtualization as they look for ways to manage their IT infrastructure and critical business information in a cost-effective way,” said Doug Smith, vice president, Global Partner Strategy and Operations, VMware. “Many still need help understanding an efficient way to achieve cost savings and protect their data. VMware has partnered with Acronis to provide small business customers the tools, products and expertise needed to adopt virtualization and move along on the journey to cloud computing.

“Every company needs high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, no matter how large or small,” said David Junca, vice president sales and channels Americas for Acronis. “Acronis has award winning technology that has served the small business market for almost a decade and VMware has an industry-leading virtualization solution proven in thousands of organizations worldwide. By creating a dedicated campaign, we have built a financially attractive proposition that can accelerate our channel partners’ business.”

Resellers and distributors who wish to find out more about this initiative and become an Acronis Channel Partner should go to www.acronis.com/partners

About Acronis
Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis.

A new study released today by ExactTarget finds that more than half of U.S. consumers who’ve made at least one purchase on their smartphone have done so based on a marketing message delivered via mobile email.

“With more than 89 percent of U.S. online consumers owning a cell phone and 40 percent owning a smartphone, this is a watershed moment for marketers”

Featured in Mobile Dependence Day, the latest in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series, the finding is one of many new insights into how consumers are shopping, making purchases and becoming more dependent on emails, text alerts and mobile coupons delivered to their smartphones every day.

“With more than 89 percent of U.S. online consumers owning a cell phone and 40 percent owning a smartphone, this is a watershed moment for marketers,” said Jeff Rohrs, vice president, ExactTarget’s Marketing Research and Education Group. “Rapid smartphone adoption is transforming how consumers interact with brands and connect to the world.”

While calling, texting and emailing remain the most frequent daily activities for smartphone users, the study found consumers are increasingly using their smartphones for more than the basics.

Key findings of the research include:

• More than two-thirds of people would choose to keep their smartphone over an iPad or similar tablet computer (69%) or a game system such as Playstation or Wii (72%)
• More than a third would give up their laptop computer (40%) or microwave (34%) to stay connected with their smartphone
• 16 percent of smartphone owners have completed at least one purchase as a direct result of a marketing message they received on their smartphone
• Of those, 55 percent have completed a purchase directly on their smartphone, 43 percent have completed a purchase on their computer, and 35 percent report purchasing in-store
• 35 percent of smartphone users check Facebook several times a day on their smartphone
• 34 percent of people have checked a bank account balance on their smartphone
• 28 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone at least once to check in using location-based services like Foursquare or Facebook Places
• 24 percent have scanned a QR code or barcode on their smartphone

“A majority of smartphone owners are now comfortable making purchases with their smartphones,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “However, as our Mobile Dependence Day report makes clear, smartphone messaging is driving purchases across all channels—online and off. Marketers must, therefore, look to optimize their messaging in ways that recognize the consumer’s mobility and control.”

Mobile Dependence Day is the ninth research brief in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series. The series provides marketers exclusive insight into how U.S. consumers interact with brands online based on a series of focus groups, interviews and surveys conducted in May and June 2011. For more information about the study and to access the Subscribers, Fans & Followers data, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub ^TM 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, Aurora Fashions, 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 or call 1-866-EMAILET.

Exinda, a provider of Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization and application performance management solutions, has launched its cloud-based Network Reporting Center (NRC).

The NRC is an advanced reporting solution designed to address the need of the IT department for comprehensive network wide reporting and long term historical trending and analytics by offering a comprehensive view of the entire worldwide network.

It addresses some of the issues facing network managers about network performance such as why the network is slow, how important business applications are performing on the network, which ones are consuming all of the bandwidth, and how much bandwidth is being consumed by recreational applications.

The solution provides real-time troubleshooting and historical reporting of all of the applications on the WAN and on an organization’s Internet connections. NRC shows the actual applications and users consuming network resources. It is offered as a cloud solution or as an on-site virtual appliance.

“With NRC, network managers now have the tools to monitor overall network performance, analyze historical data to anticipate problems, identify key trends in performance, and address them before they impact the user experience,” said Kevin Suitor (News – Alert), Exinda‘s vice president of marketing, in a statement.

NRC collects network data from each location, including head office and branches, and consolidates the data into a single, centralized reporting dashboard. It provides granular, by-the-minute reporting in real time, as well as up to two years of historical data on the applications traversing the network.

Exinda’s comprehensive reporting solution integrates easily with the existing network, with no additional hardware required. Its centralized reporting provides a global view into business-critical applications, WAN utilization, and network and application performance problems across entire worldwide network, company officials said.

Earlier this year, Exinda announced its Exinda devices and operating systems will provide full support for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic with the launch of the next version of its ExOS 6.x software.

With this capability, the company enables network operators to continue to easily monitor, manage and optimize network traffic as users with IPv6 addresses begin accessing organizations’ WAN.

Beyond simple ALM, the Skytap/HP approach lets cloud adopters use automation to break through silos across dev/test, QA and provisioning to more quickly identify, locate and resolve bugs — and even make user-requested updates.

Skytap and HP are partnering to provide automated cloud-enabled ALM (application lifecycle management). Beyond simple ALM, the Skytap/HP approach lets cloud adopters use automation to break through silos across dev/test, QA and provisioning to more quickly identify, locate and resolve bugs — and even make user-requested updates.

By putting cloud’s three key stakeholders (dev, QA and provisioning) on the same page, Skytap can reduce time and cost for getting cloud apps designed tested and up and running by up to 70%, Sundar Raghavan, Skytap’s chief product and marketing officer, told IDN.

“While everybody talks about ‘dev/test,’ we talk about ‘quick response time between phases or silos,” Raghavan said. This distinction is not just wordplay, he added. It is a core perspective for how Skytap is working with HP to optimize ALM for an emerging class of new cloud-based approaches to software design, development and deployment.

Raghavan explained Skytap’s approach to an automated, cloud-focused ALM to IDN this way:

“As people embrace the cloud, they are moving to dev/ops model, where traditional IT policies are applicable. But, they are also creating environments where they need to do a better job of moving [projects] back and forth between phases – not just share with team members in one phase,” Raghavan said.

While agile and similar methodologies do bring some benefits to developers, these methodologies can also create silos between developer and testing/QA phases. That, in turn, can delay provisioning and operations,

“Silos add time and costs because they make it impossible for dev and QA teams to identically reproduce errors or behaviors,” he added.

Skytaps’s Automated ALM for Cloud:
Role-Based Access to Virtual Images
Under the covers, Raghavan makes using Skytap sound as simple as publishing a blog post from “draft” to “make public” in WordPress.

“To share a project from development with a production user is simple. You can promote your [dev] project to QA, pre-production or production, restricting changes,” he said. “If the QA users find issues, they simply can send the project back to the dev team, where everyone can see the actual problems, as well as share, collaborate and retest against the same image, and this makes a huge difference.”

Skytap lets a wide range of stakeholders duplicate images, share images or even move images back and forth between stages – all to make sure errors are precisely shared without the inability to replicate. The approach also provides exact duplicates of projects, snapshots of code instances at every step and better managed source code control.

“Instead of version control, we allow images to be updated, based on role and access control,” Raghavan told IDN. “This gives all stakeholders more control so that developers can fix bugs found in QA, and even end users can ask for changes in systems already rolled out to production.”

A Deeper Look at Skytap, HP ALM 11 Integration
Skytap also announced integration with HP’s ALM 11 suite to enable customers and HP partners to more easily leverage the cloud for comprehensive software development and testing.

The integration leverages Skytap’s support for security policy management, advanced virtual data centers and self-service hybrid clouds. Capabilities enabled by the integration include:

• Requirements management for agile development and testing environments
• Capability to fully test the performance and scalability of applications before they are deployed
• Ability for software teams to automatically set up, run, and tear down Skytap environments directly from the HP ALM interface.
• Distribute development and test workloads between on-premise private clouds and create secure hybrid cloud architectures in under 10 minutes.

Because HP ALM 11 allows business analysts, developers, project managers, manual testers, quality and performance assurance professionals to collaborate on a single system of record, adding Skytap integration lets customers further reduce time and costs, said David Griffin, vice president of cloud, HP Software, in a statement.