What Investors Look For In A CEO

by OpenView

When investors write a check for an early-stage company, there needs to be a standout leader. But what are the key qualities?

Well, to get some answers, I recently talked to Adam Marcus, who is a managing partner at OpenView, which is a $700 million venture capital firm. No doubt, he has spent many hours vetting CEOs — and only a few have been able to make the cut. But then again, the payoff has been strong. Consider that OpenView has funded companies like ExactTarget (which was purchased by Salesforce.com) and Mashery.

For Adam, he looks at the CEO role as involving the following key factors:

Read more on Forbes >

4 Factors That Will Jumpstart the Boston Tech Party Revolution

by Scott Maxwell

Boston’s tech scene should shake off its inferiority complex: The “Boston Tech Party” revolution is starting to unfold.

After many years of under-the-radar growth and profitable companies, the arrival of General Electric to the Seaport District brings Boston the high-profile “anchor tenant” we’ve been seeking. It is one great step forward for Boston.
Read more on TechCrunch

Blackboard and Skytap Partner to Offer Cloud-Based Virtual Training Labs

by OpenView

WASHINGTON – Blackboard Inc., the world’s leading education technology company, today announced a partnership with Skytap to provide cloud-based, on-demand virtual training labs via the company’s flagship learning management system (LMS), Blackboard Learn™. The integration, known as Virtual Training Labs powered by Skytap, enables education professionals to reach more learners through browser-based and mobile user interfaces, enhances the user experience with self-service class enrollment, and gives instructors full control of the virtual classroom.

Skytap provides cloud-based virtual training environments to help enterprises deliver better hands-on software training. Through the partnership, Blackboard customers now can provide virtual instructor-led, self-paced and on-demand certifications and practice labs, and rapidly create new classes and provision virtual labs with no IT intervention or reprogramming. Instructors have full control of the virtual labs, including registration, billing and usage monitoring, with over-the-shoulder views of learner progress, and a suspend capability to temporarily halt labs.

The user experience has also been improved, giving learners the ability to access labs from any desktop or mobile browser. They can now learn at their own speed and on their own class schedule with self-paced labs that can be suspended and resumed as needed.

“We are excited to partner with Skytap to offer more virtual training options for our customers,” said Valerie Schreiner, VP of Product Management at Blackboard. “Many of these learners are already in fast-paced working environments, but want to continue to build on their skills and knowledge. Virtual Training Labs powered by Skytap will make it easier for professionals to grow careers with technology – while learning at their own pace.”

“The integration of Blackboard’s learning management system with Skytap’s virtual training lab solutions is a game-changer in the industry,” says Wayne H. Monk, Vice President of Business Development and Alliances at Skytap. “Blackboard Learning Labs automates the delivery of dynamic learning infrastructure and content with the scale and flexibility today’s business learners demand, replacing what was once a very disjointed student experience and labor-intensive setup process.”

Virtual Training Labs powered by Skytap, a combined solution for self-service virtual classrooms, is available today with pricing on a subscription and usage basis.

For more information about Blackboard, please visit www.blackboard.com or follow @Blackboard on Twitter.

About Blackboard Inc.
Blackboard is the world’s leading education technology company. We challenge conventional thinking and advance new models of learning in order to reimagine education and make it more accessible, engaging and relevant to the modern-day learner and the institutions that serve them. In partnership with our customers and partners in higher education and K-12 as well as corporations and government agencies around the world, our mission is to help every learner achieve their full potential by inspiring a passion for lifelong learning. For more information about Blackboard, follow us on Twitter @Blackboard.

About Skytap, Inc.
Skytap is a public cloud provider that extends enterprise Cloud and DevOps strategies to traditional on-premises applications. Skytap uniquely supports application modernization with production-ready development, software testing and training environments that work the same way as an on-premises data center. Skytap packages servers, VMs, networks, data and configurations into environments can be provisioned, cloned, started, suspended and deleted with a single click. To try Skytap and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

CONTACTS:

For Blackboard:
Peter Milligan, Blackboard Inc.
202.303.9243 or [email protected]

For Skytap:
Melissa Boggs; Barokas Public Relations
206.264.8220 or [email protected]

SOURCE Blackboard Inc.

RELATED LINKS
http://www.blackboard.com

Is There a Down Round in Your Future?

by Rufus King

Recent data indicates that the venture financing market may have hit a peak in 2015. While valuations are up for the year, the fourth quarter numbers were down in terms of capital invested. And more alarmingly, venture liquidity events slid in Q4 to the lowest number since 2011. The paucity of exits, as well as pullback in the public markets, cannot help but drive down private company valuations in 2016.

Read on Forbes

Workfront Recognized as a Leader in the Gartner 2016 Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management

by OpenView

SILICON SLOPES, Utah, Feb. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Workfront, the leading provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Managementsolutions, today announced that the company has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Leaders” quadrant of the Gartner, Inc. 2016 Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management.1

“More and more marketing teams and creative agencies are seeing the value of moving beyond email and spreadsheets to manage their ever-demanding workloads,” said Eric Morgan, CEO of Workfront.  “This technology move by creative services, marketing operations, content marketing, and other teams has been the reason we’ve posted strong double digit growth in the marketing segment of our business.  We continue to invest heavily in R&D, and the middle of last year, we expanded our offering for marketing work management by acquiring the leader in digital review and approval, ProofHQ. Given the great respect Gartner has earned in the market, we appreciate the insight their report will provide to our potential customers.”

This is the third consecutive year that Gartner has included Workfront in the Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management. Workfront has also been recognized as a leader for the past four consecutive years in the Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based IT Project and Portfolio Management Services, Worldwide.2

Gartner evaluates vendors on five weighted criteria based on their relative strengths in the market, including: planning and financial management, creative production management, marketing asset/knowledge management, marketing fulfillment, and MRM analytic and optimization.

To download the full report, visit www.workfront.com/marketing/resource/whitepaper/gartner-mrm-magic-quadrant.

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Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Workfront

Workfront is a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution that helps marketing, IT, and other enterprise teams conquer the chaos of excessive email, redundant status meetings, and disconnected tools. Unlike other tools, Workfront Enterprise Work Cloud is a centralized, easy-to-adopt solution for managing and collaborating on all types of work through the entire work lifecycle, which improves team productivity and executive visibility. Workfront is trusted by thousands of global enterprises, like Cars.com, Cisco Systems, Comcast, iProspect, Schneider Electric and Trek. To learn more, visit www.workfront.com or follow us on Twitter @Workfront_Inc.

1 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management,” by Kimberly Collins, February 8, 2016

2 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based IT Project and Portfolio Management Services, Worldwide, Daniel B. Stang, Robert A. Handler, Teresa Jones, 20 May 2015

Contact: Shelbi Gomez
[email protected]
801-477-9813

Logo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150121/170565LOGO

 

SOURCE Workfront

SwiftStack and VeriStor Partner to Provide Cost Efficient Enterprise Cloud Infrastructures

by OpenView

SAN FRANCISCO & ATLANTA — SwiftStack, the leader in a new breed of object storage, today announced it has partnered with VeriStor, an advanced IT solutions provider specializing in virtual infrastructure and enterprise private, public and hybrid cloud services and solutions. By integrating SwiftStack’s object storage into its enterprise cloud services portfolio, VeriStor is expanding its offerings for easy-to-consume storage with ultra-simplified cloud management that scales seamlessly across multiple data centers.

The customer adoption of object storage is rising with IDC predicting that it will be a $28.3 billion market by 2018. Driving this growth is an overwhelming desire among businesses for a software-centric approach to storage, one that offers the cost-effective scalability of the cloud and avoids vendor and hardware lock-in.

Responding to an increasing need from its medium to large enterprise customers for greater storage agility and efficiency, VeriStor is adding SwiftStack, which is built on an open source engine, to its storage portfolio. This will provide VeriStor customers with software-based enterprise-ready storage that delivers simplicity, pay-as-you-grow licensing and massive scale independent of hardware.

“One of the biggest challenges we’re seeing is the ability for customers to effectively manage both application growth and petabytes of data,” said Don Jaworski, CEO of SwiftStack. “With this new partnership, VeriStor will be able to offer their customers infrastructure for data protection across multiple sites. Especially considering VeriStor’s strong relationship with Commvault, the ability to offer Commvault’s data and information management paired with SwiftStack as software-defined storage for backup data presents customers with an extremely valuable package.”

“We take pride in the fact that our customers receive the best software solutions and services possible, and adding SwiftStack to our portfolio of offerings was an easy decision to make,” said Ashby Lincoln, President and CEO Of VeriStor. “SwiftStack’s Object Storage software allows us to help our customers effectively overcome diverse storage demands, simplifying their management approach in the process.”

About VeriStor

At VeriStor, we design, implement and manage IT solutions that fuel business productivity. As an end-to-end solutions provider, VeriStor specializes in enterprise data storage, virtual infrastructure, public, private and hybrid cloud services, migration, and technology financing. Headquartered in Atlanta, VeriStor delivers solutions nationwide to enterprise and mid-market companies in all industries including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, education and federal, state and local government. To learn how VeriStor can help you achieve an IT infrastructure that accelerates business growth, improves efficiencies and reduces costs, visit: http://www.veristor.com.

About SwiftStack

SwiftStack innovations power object storage for Enterprises, offering freedom of choice for genuine simplicity and TCO at scale. SwiftStack has perfected the delivery of private cloud object storage within and across data centers for content delivery, active archive, and data-centric workflows. The SwiftStack solution, built on OpenStack Swift at its core, is managed by a unique out-of-band controller and includes scale-out nodes with rolling upgrades as well as a filesystem gateway interface for traditional applications. No object storage solution is as flexible, simple, or open as SwiftStack, which has driven adoption by HP Cloud, eBay, and PAC-12 among many F500 companies. Connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn, or please visit www.swiftstack.com.