Normandy Real Estate Partners has signed five leases totaling 51,056 square feet at 281 and 321 Summer Street in Boston, Mass, both of which were purchased by Normandy in 2007.

The CB Richard Ellis /New England team of Bill Crean, Senior Vice President/Partner, Ogden White, Senior Vice President/Partner, and Tim Howe, Vice President, represented the landlord in all transactions.

Space with a Soul has signed a lease at 281 Summer Street, a seven-story 173,241 square foot office building. The non-profit mission accelerator occupies 14,592 square feet. Space with a Soul was represented by Deb Stevens, Principal of The Stevens Group.

The four other deals were inked at 321 Summer Street, an eight-story 93,964 square foot building.

– AisleBuyer LLC, the creator of mobile self-checkout software, occupies 10,813 square feet on the eighth floor; Landmark Real Estate Advisors’ Principal, Eric Solem, and Partner, Robert Elmer, represented AisleBuyer LLC.

– Zmags, the online publishing platform provider, is moving into 10,635 square feet on the third floor; Zmags was represented by Graham Allison , Assistant Broker, and Mark Cote, Managing Director/Co-Founder, of T3 Advisors.

– Apperian, a mobile application management firm, moved into 8,903 square feet on the first floor; Apperian was represented by Matt Godoff, Advisor, and Karyn McFarland, Senior Vice President, of Grubb & Ellis.

– Architecture firm isgenuity LLC will take 6,113 square feet on the fourth floor. Boston Realty Advisors’ Adam Schneier, Managing Director, represented isgenuity LLC.

The two historic office buildings in South Boston’s Fort Point Channel Seaport District, dating back to 1910 and 1911, have undergone major renovations to update the lobbies and install new HVAC systems, electrical service, windows, roofs, sprinklers and elevators.

Both are accessible via public transportation and nearby highways. They are located in a vibrant and upcoming neighborhood that features several cultural, retail and business attractions. Developers, together with the City of Boston, are turning the district into a 24-hour neighborhood, which should help expand nearby attractions and public amenities, as well as increase the appeal and value of its real estate.

A university in Fredericksburg, VA has begun its move to a new open source, SaaS-based learning management system. Several instructors at the University of Mary Washington have started using Instructure Canvas in place of Blackboard software for their summer courses. The campus, whose Blackboard contract ends in August 2011, will move fully to Canvas in the fall semester.

An LMS committee of faculty and students had been meeting since spring 2010 to evaluate alternatives to Blackboard. The college had been running version 8, which was initially released in early 2008. Finalists under consideration included Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodlerooms, and Instructure. In January 2011 each vendor gave a two-hour presentation, in which they were expected to enter a syllabus, upload and manage media, control course and guest access, use built-in and third-party tools, and demonstrate other aspects of the applications. Instructure was announced as the winner in February.

Canvas is an open source LMS delivered as software as a service. A major draw of the browser-based application is its integration with multiple popular Web 2.0 services, including Facebook, Google Docs, and Twitter, as well as email and RSS. Discussion posts can include audio and video. The program also integrates features that simplify instructor administration, such as assignment grading and tracking learning outcomes. A built-in notification system can be configured to send certain types of messages to the teacher’s phone. An integrated web conferencing system is available to set up group meetings.

Although the product has migration tools, U Mary Washington is advising its instructors to recreate their course materials.

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions featuring Unified Performance Management (UPM), will showcase the new Exinda Edge Cache™ at Educomm 2011 at Hilton Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida from June 13 – 15. Visitors are invited to experience live demonstrations of Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions, which have been chosen by educational facilities around the world to improve the performance of applications on their networks.

“The demand for video applications that enhance learning and facilitate administrative functions is growing rapidly. Sites such as YouTube have moved beyond the realm of social media, as organizations have come to rely on video to deliver content,” said Kevin Suitor, VP of Marketing, Exinda. “With the Exinda Edge Cache, network administrators can ensure a high quality user experience with video traffic on the WAN, without impeding the performance of other critical applications.”

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.

By eliminating the repetitive download of content over the WAN, the Exinda Edge Cache dramatically improves the speed and performance of internet applications. Added Suitor, “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 Exinda Unified Performance Management (UPM) solution encompasses application visibility, control, optimization and intelligent acceleration – all within a single network appliance that is affordable and easy to manage. Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and has established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda is a 100% channel business with products being distributed by a worldwide network of solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

United Biscuits uses NetApp storage virtualisation with IBM storage

United Biscuits has combined existing IBM SAN equipment with a new NetApp FAS array using NetApp V-series storage virtualisation hardware in a move that will boost storage capacity and establish a hot failover disaster recovery site for its virtualised server environment.

The snack maker–which owns a large portfolio of UK brands, including McVitie’s, Jacob’s, Carr’s, McCoy’s, Hula Hoops and KP–had made a significant investment in IBM storage hardware over the years, but it was proving expensive to expand and operate.

Steve Summersgill, technical services manager at United Biscuits, said, “The high cost of maintenance of our existing system together with the requirement for improved disaster recovery and our move towards increased virtualisation offered us the opportunity to re-evaluate our storage strategy.”

After researching the market, United Biscuits came up with a shortlist of three options. Two were rip-and-replace proposals, but the company went with a proposition from NetApp partner ANS to use a V3140 storage virtualisation appliance and integrate the existing IBM SAN into the new environment with a NetApp FAS 3140 providing storage at a second, new DR site.

“We wanted to provide instant failover in the event of an emergency to ensure seamless business continuity,” said Summersgill.

The V3140 functions as a NAS gateway and a SAN virtualisation engine and has unified storage provision into a single platform with 35 TB of capacity. Currently, 50% of the data and most key applications have been relocated onto the new NetApp appliance. The rest of the data will be migrated when the second site is operational and replication has been configured.

Law firm gets virtual I/O

London-based international law firm Stephenson Harwood has deployed Xsigo I/O virtualisation and gained fourfold I/O performance increases and a 66% reduction in storage and networking costs.

Stephenson Harwood purchased two Xsigo VP560 I/O Directors to ensure maximum I/O between virtual servers and SAN storage by offloading the majority of server-to-server traffic from the Ethernet core. Xsigo’s virtual I/O technology splits a single physical server connection into many virtual connections.

Chris Petrie, IT director of Stephenson Harwood, said, “We had planned to expand our use of 10 Gbps Ethernet but found that Xsigo virtual I/O could deliver four times the I/O performance to our servers and accommodate Fibre Channel connections as well, all for about the same cost as a 10 Gbps Ethernet infrastructure alone.”

Petrie added, “Xsigo let us efficiently reuse our existing 1 Gbps Ethernet infrastructure and reduced our Fibre Channel port count needs by 66%, significantly reducing cabling and port costs and minimising disruption.”

Acronis launches channel programme

Data protection vendor Acronis has launched a new global channel partner programme aimed at enhancing the virtualisation and cloud capabilities of its partners that target the SMB market. The new Acronis Partner Programme is a four-tier programme that offers partners access to technical support and demand generation assets from Acronis. To reach each tier of partnership, partners are required to achieve a certain level of revenue and certification accreditations in return for discounts and more opportunities.

Atempo certified for Dell object storage

Data protection vendor Atempo has announced that Atempo Digital Archive (ADA) has been certified for the Dell DX Object Storage Platform. ADA automatically organises data and makes it accessible using hierarchical storage management capabilities. By tracking metadata and using metadata-based policies, ADA and the DX Object Storage Platform can manage how long and where the data is stored.

Coraid boosts EMEA presence

ATA-over-Ethernet vendor Coraid has announced increased investment in resources in Europe, Middle East and Africa. The vendor currently has more than 350 customers in the region and recently appointed Marcos Burnett to the position of EMEA sales director and opened regional headquarters in the UK. “We decided that the most effective way to manage our rapid growth in this territory would be to install a local team and to formalise the relationships we have started building with European resellers through a channel programme,” said Burnett.

HDS UK appointment

Hitachi Data Systems has announced the appointment of Stephen Ball to the post of vice president and general manager of UK, Ireland and South Africa. Ball joins Hitachi Data Systems from Orange Business Services, where he was sales director for the global network provider. His 24-year career in ICT also includes 11 years at Computacenter and senior positions at KPN Getronics and EMC.

Magirus distributes vBundles

Distributor Magirus has launched a new range of its vBundle unified data centre bundles. The vBundles comprise compute, network, storage and data management technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC integrated into preconfigured bundles for resellers. Magirus will offer three variations of the VNX/VNXe-based vBundles: the entry level VNXe 3100 vBundle, the midrange VNX 3300 vBundle and the high-end VNX 5300 vBundle.

Survey: UK lagging on IT DR compared with US

Only 56% of UK organisations have integrated IT disaster recovery into their business continuity plan, while 82.6% of those in the US have made this move. That’s one result of a survey of about 2,500 IT managers and C-level executives commissioned by DR software supplier Neverfail. Respondents in the US (29.5%) and the UK (31.3%) also said that they do not consider cloud platforms to be a viable option for DR.

StorageCraft releases VM restore tool

StorageCraft Technology has released StorageCraft ShadowProtect Virtual, which allows users to back up systems and data on any Windows system and recover it to any kind of environment: a virtual machine, physical hardware or in the cloud. ShadowProtect Virtual licenses are priced per virtual machine and include support for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Oracle VirtualBox.

TMS releases RamSan-70 PCIe card

Texas Memory Systems has released the RamSan-70, a 900 GB half-length PCIe card featuring Toshiba’s newest 32 nanometre SLC flash technology. The RamSan-70 is the first product powered by Texas Memory Systems’ new Series-7 Flash Controller, which handles all flash management functions without impacting the host CPU. It incorporates TMS reliability technology such as chip-level RAID, an advanced ECC algorithm and its patented Variable Stripe RAID (VSR) error mitigation technology to give an expected life span of six to 10 years.

In 1945, the managers of a tiny car manufacturer in Japan took stock of their situation and discovered that the giant firms of the U.S. auto industry were eight times more productive than their firm. They realized that they would never catch up unless they improved their productivity ten-fold.

Impossible as this goal seemed, the managers set out on a path of continuous improvement that 60 years later had transformed their tiny company into the largest automaker in the world and driven the giants of Detroit to the very brink of bankruptcy. In that firm—Toyota—the commitment to continuous improvement is still a religion: over a million suggestions for improvement are received from their employees and dealt with each year.

A key practice in the religion of continuous improvement—and radical management—is the retrospective review: a process of reflecting on what has been done and finding ways to generate a better outcome for customers— delivering more value or delivering it sooner. In this world view, there is no such thing as “best” practice; every practice can be improved. Nor is there any such thing as “unskilled labor”; there is only work to which intelligence has yet to be applied.

OpenView Labs has just issued a helpful free ebook entitled, Get Better Faster: The Ultimate Guide to the Practice of Retrospectives, for which I wrote a foreword. You can download the free ebook here.

The importance in the expansion phase

The retrospective is particularly important in the expansion stage of any new business. As John Bradberry writes in his insightful book, 6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business (AMACOM, 2011), this is a period when the firm is starting to see results and its leaders are beginning to experience the thrill of success. Yet paradoxically, the beginnings of success are often the cause of the high rate of failure. Early success can lead to overly rosy projections and over-confidence in what is currently working while underestimating the difficulties that still lie ahead.

Early success may also cause the dismissal of issues that currently look trivial but actually represent symptoms of significant trouble ahead. It can encourage the firm to put the bulk of its resources into a single business strategy that looks as though it is the winner rather than preserving flexibility to experiment and iterate the way to sustained profitability. It can cause the leadership team to be trapped inside a “feel-good bubble” where bad news is avoided or glossed over and tough issues are not directly tackled. This can lead to an evaporating runway; what was assumed to be a lengthy expansion period can rapidly contract as unexpected problems cause the venture to run out of cash and time. When done right, the retrospective review can be a powerful antidote to counteract these tendencies.

This short handbook breaks down the key components of the retrospective review. Inside you will learn why it is important, find details on how to go about it, and discover the pitfalls and difficulties that lie in the way of conducting retrospectives successfully.

You can download the free ebook here.

Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced new cloud testing capabilities that leverage HP’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions. 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.

“Enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud computing to reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability,” said Scott Roza, CEO of Skytap. “Skytap provides a cost-effective, agile solution to accelerate the development and testing of applications. Our collaboration with HP provides customers with a best of breed solution for application development and testing that leverages HP’s ALM offerings, Skytap’s cloud platform, and HP partner services.”

According to Gartner, Inc., organizations that want to extend the application life cycle beyond development to production environments using a consistent application model should evaluate development tools or point solutions that provide out-of-the-box integration with development build tools. Additionally, they must determine whether life cycle tools can address the needs of multiple teams (such as development and testing), while also meeting broad enterprise requirements; this will reduce costs.*

Skytap’s integration with ALM 11 enables enterprise customers to access the full lifecycle of application development and testing in the cloud. Customers can now plan, build and release higher quality applications while leveraging the cloud for scalability and agility, while distributed teams can access cloud-based testing environments to enhance collaboration and sharing for rapid bug reproduction and issue resolution.

Capabilities enabled by the integration include:

• Requirements management for agile development and testing environments to be delivered in the Skytap Cloud.
• Performance, load and stress testing of applications with the dynamic scale out of cloud-based load generators from HP Load Runner to cost-effectively simulate thousands of virtual users. With this capability, customers can now fully test the performance and scalability of applications before they are deployed.
• Automated functional and regression testing utilizing HP’s Quick Test Professional. This capability allows 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 cloud and Skytap cloud environments.
• Create secure hybrid cloud architectures in under 10 minutes using Skytap’s self-service user interface.
• Application security testing utilizing HP’s Application Security Center that simulates cloud or on-premise based attacks.

Through this enhanced product collaboration, Skytap and HP customers, as well as HP partners, can utilize Skytap and HP ALM to meet all of their application development and pre-production testing needs in the cloud. The integration leverages several new features from Skytap including security policy management, advanced virtual data center (VDC) options and self-service hybrid clouds. These capabilities are critical in helping development and test teams cut costs by more than 70 percent, and accelerate development and deployment cycles by 75 percent or more.

“Organizations moving their applications to the cloud require a solution that allows all stakeholders across development teams to accelerate and manage application delivery,” said Jonathan Rende, general manager and vice president, Applications, Software, HP. “The integration of Skytap with HP ALM gives application development teams a single tool to collaborate in the cloud, helping to further reduce application delivery cycles and significantly lower costs.”

“Orasi applauds these integrations as they allow us to provide accelerated validation capabilities in a simple, self service, and solution-orientated cloud environment,” said Caleb Billingsley, area vice president of Orasi, an HP partner. “This significantly reduces complexity for our customers as we help them roll out reliable, scalable, and secure business applications.”

In addition to the HP ALM integration, Skytap also announced its upcoming DevOps Webinar, which takes place on June 14 at 10am PT, and features Rachel Chalmers, research director at The 451 Group.

*Gartner, Inc., Managing Between Applications and Operations: The Vendor Landscape, Ronni J. Colville & Donna Scott, April 5, 2011.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap enables users to run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations can gain visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs by 70% or more. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap to their data centers and create virtual private clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including application development, testing, virtual training, application migration and sales demonstration projects. To buy or learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

A corporate blog is often a foundation for any successful content marketing program.  The blog itself can be an insightful resource for your current and prospective customers, provide material and ideas for repurposed content, and increase site traffic.  The benefits of spreading the blogging responsibilities across the entire organization can be crystal clear, but often times it may be challenging to keep motivation high, especially for those outside of the marketing department.

Here are some essentials that have driven results in our corporate blogging program.

Put one individual in charge of the blog

The blogging administrator encourages all bloggers to consistently participate in and communicates any news about the blogging program.  Essentially, the blogging administrator:

• Develops the overall plan
• Gets buy-in from the CEO or president of the company
• Works with the other employees on meeting their goals.

Hold regular training sessions

New marketing efforts that encompass the entire organization typically begin with some training, but the training shouldn’t end there.  It is important to have additional training sessions throughout the year  to keep your bloggers comfortable.  Key training topics may include:

• Keyword research
• Target audience personas
• New technology
• New topics/ideas for blogging
• Marketing the blog content

Share the results on a regular basis

Continually remind everyone of the impact and progress of your corporate blogging program.  A regular report can keep the importance of blogging top of mind and hold everyone accountable.  OpenView has set up its corporate blogging program so that almost every blogger is required to submit a blog post each week.  As a result, we send an email every Friday that shares the following information:

• Critical blogging statistics such as the number of page views, unique visitors, click through rates, and amount of search engine traffic, among others
• Number of page views per blogger to help accountability and highlight bloggers that are doing well (and not so well)
• Number of  target posts per quarter or year per person versus the actual number of posts per quarter or year
• Update on the rankings of our targeted keywords
• Number of new leads or leads converted

Hold retrospectives or progress reviews throughout the year

A regular meeting outside of your training meetings either with the entire organization or representatives from each department could also boost motivation.  This sort of meeting can help identify issues and ultimately shape future training sessions to improve the program overall. During the meeting, the blogging administrator should lead the discussion around the following questions:

• Are the topics of the posts relevant to your business objectives?
• Are you seeing a gradual increase in visitors, page views, and time spent on the site?
• Does the design quality of your blog reflect your company’s culture and style?
• Are your bloggers formatting their posts correctly to engage the audience?
• Are you using the best keywords possible to attract traffic through search engines?
• Are your blogs optimized for search engines to the fullest potential?
• What is your Google ranking for each of your targeted keywords?
• Do you have an effective strategy for releasing content regularly and consistently?
• Are you marketing your blog in the best ways possible (social media, influencers, newsletters, etc.)?
• Are your bloggers truly writing to your target personas?

Tap into your employees competitive side and hold a contest

I have written about blogging contests on CMI before, but when it comes down to it, contests are always a great way to boost motivation and excitement.  I have previously shared an idea for a weekly contest before so here is an idea for a monthly contest:

Keep track of the number of page views each blogger has every week, which bloggers land in one of the top three spots each week, and the number of posts each blogger writes throughout the month.  The three bloggers with the most page views and most posts wins.

If you decide to hold a contest like this every month, determine an appropriate prize.  Some examples could be a bottle of wine, a Kindle, an afternoon off, or a free lunch.

Just a quick note:  You may consider having a blogging contest every month until motivation and excitement remain high.

Do you need more tips for running a successful blogging initiative?  OpenView Labs has packaged a complete guide to help all companies start a corporate blogging program (Note: This requires registration). This eBook includes an introduction to corporate blogging, checklists and quick start guides for each person responsible for kicking off a successful blogging initiative. The eBook features unique tips from content marketing experts Ann Handley, Jonathan Kranz and Joe Pulizzi. Get your copy today by visiting OpenView Labs.

As young companies grow out of the startup phase, the need to recruit and hire experienced senior leadership becomes inevitable. Such was the case for Balihoo, a local marketing automation software company based in Boise.

As 2011 approached, the company found its rising fortunes slowed by challenges with its inside sales team. Balihoo founder and CEO Pete Gombert identified one of the primary issues — the lack of an experienced sales executive to lead the operation.

“We were doing the best with what we had and we were succeeding,” said Gombert. “But to say that there wasn’t some turbulence would be a lie. We were borrowing resources from within our own company to make it work. It wasn’t very efficient and if we wanted to really go after some new opportunities, that had to change.”

So in early 2011, Gombert and company teamed up with OpenView Venture Partners to revamp its inside sales process. The firm, which made a capital investment in Balihoo in 2009, offered to help provide the insight, training, and recruitment services the company needed to build an efficient and scalable inside sales organization.

In a short time, the partnership had succeeded in refining Balihoo’s database of sales leads, promoted and executed a couple of well-attended webinars, and developed a 25-page sales training handbook for both seasoned and incoming team members. Most importantly, the company found a qualified VP of Sales to lead the way.

“Without question, what they did in less than three months would have taken us at least nine. We went from flying blind to a singular, repeatable sales process in one quarter,” said Matt Borud, a senior member of Balihoo’s Client Development and Program Management team.

To learn more about this partnership, please read the case study in full.

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.