Factors that are likely to influence your answer include varying levels of executive buy-in to the disaster and recovery idea, IT resources, your company’s history of data-loss incidents and the challenges of managing hybrid data environments, according to a recent survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The survey, sponsored by backup and recovery vendor Acronis, asked more than 3,000 small- and medium-sized businesses in 12 countries about their backup and recovery environments. Businesses in some countries, the survey found, are far more prepared for data disasters than in others. The adoption of cloud-based solutions in the SMB, according to the survey, will nearly double this year. When the survey was conducted in October 2010, respondents said cloud-based services made up 16% of their IT infrastructure. By the end of 2011, that number is expected to rise to 30% of IT infrastructure across all regions. Acronis used Ponemon Research’s findings to create the Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index.

David Brussin, CEO of Monetate (www.monetate.com), a leading vendor of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites, joins an executive panel on the future of online retailing, taking place this week during the fifth annual “OnMedia NYC 2011″ event at The Paley Center for Media in New York (www.bit.ly/OnMediaNYC).

The title of the panel is “The New, New World of E-Shopping” and the host is Patti Freeman Evans, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research. In addition to David Brussin, the panelists include Doug Merritt, CEO of Baynote, and Chris Paradysz, CEO of PMDigital.

The panel will address “how new innovations and tactics such as location-based services, instant price comparisons, and time-based invitations to buy continue to disrupt the shopping world.”

“I am delighted to join such a distinguished panel of industry experts,” said Brussin, adding: “At Monetate we help retailers implement innovations all the time, and while some innovations are less disruptive than others, all share a focus on transforming both the online shopping experience and retailer’s bottom line.”

Key Facts:

• What: Executive panel on the future of online shopping at OnMedia NYC.
• Where: Mark Goodson Theater, The Paley Center for Media, New York.
• When: 11:55AM on Tuesday, February 1.
• Who: David Brussin, CEO of Monetate; Patti Freeman Evans, VP & Research Director at Forrester Research; Doug Merritt, CEO of Baynote; and Chris Paradysz, CEO of PMDigital.

About OnMedia NYC

Billed as the event “Where Madison Avenue meets Silicon Valley,” OnMedia NYC is a two-and-a-half-day executive conference that features high-level debates on how the Internet is disrupting the world of marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations. OnMedia also showcases the top entrepreneurial CEOs who are revolutionizing the way media is being created, distributed, consumed, and analyzed. OnMedia is one of a series of executive events from AlwaysOn (AO), the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley. In 2004, AO became the first media brand to socially network its online readers and event attendees. AlwaysOn’s preeminent executive event series includes OnMedia, OnHollywood, Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic, OnDemand, Venture Summit Silicon Valley, Venture Summit East, GoingGreen Silicon Valley, GoingGreen East, the Global Silicon Valley Economic Summit and the Summit at Stanford.

Boston, MA – Last week expansion stage venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners hosted its portfolio companies for a 2-day forum on sales execution. The forum was organized by OpenView Labs to help the portfolio companies better their sales execution capabilities.

Specifically, the goals for the forum were to:

1. Learn where your sales team is today through a sales “risk assessment”
2. Understand the sales culture which you are capable of sustaining and how to recruit, hire and grow sales staff that will prosper within this environment
3. Identify the areas of improvement applicable to your team in the key execution areas of sales process, qualifying prospects and excessive discounting
4. Understand the metrics that will lead to the success of your organization and how to create your own “executive dashboard” to monitor the health of your sales organization

Rich Chiarello, president of Above the Line, led the 2-day event, which was a blend of presentations, hands on work, and idea sharing among participants. Above the Line specializes in Sandler Training and was founded with the belief that every day of our lives the performance of both people and organizations is either improving or declining but never standing constant. Chiarello has expertise in all areas of marketing, sales and sales processes, having trained and coached sales professionals, sales managers, marketing and professional services teams, and senior level management of both large and small companies across the world.

“The core value of the Sales Execution forum is to foster a community of idea sharing between our portfolio companies’ sales leaders while injecting best practices into business critical processes,” said OpenView Principal Brian Zimmerman.

The forum was designed to enable each sales leader to return back to his or her company with action items to improve the company’s sales engines.

“The program was extremely valuable to the uSamp team and I am hoping to put the learning into practice in our organization immediately,” said Suresh Subbiah, COO at uSamp, an online panel and technology company.

“I can speak for the Kareo team when I say that we found the content to be extremely valuable and timely,” added Dan Rodrigues, CEO at Kareo, practice management and medical billing software provider. “The event got us thinking about many of the key issues we face in building out our sales team and gave us some practical tools for success in 2011.”

To stay in touch with OpenView and learn about future events, sign up for our newsletter. To learn more about OpenView’s take on sales processes and sales execution, visit OpenView Labs.

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.

Skytap, a provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, announced that the Skytap Cloud was named a bronze winner in the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2010 Product of the Year awards in the Virtualization Management category.

Skytap was recognized for its ease of use and cost model assistance. This honor represents Skytap’s seventh award recognition in the last twelve months.

According to SearchServerVirtualization.com, “Cloud computing comes to fruition with Skytap Cloud. Virtualization battle is all about the tools you use to manage your virtual infrastructure. Understanding these products and how they enhance virtualization management capabilities is key to the success of a virtual environment. This year’s winners in the virtualization management category address monitoring needs, capacity management, the virtual network and better cost models.” Skytap offers a secure on-demand cloud automation solution built upon operating systems and standards. Hundreds of enterprises and software vendors are using the Skytap Cloud for application development and test, migration and virtual training projects. Skytap empowers functional users to create cloud based virtual environments run applications unchanged, collaborate globally, and reduce costs by 70 percent or more.

“The focus of our innovation is to empower users such as development managers, test engineers and training mangers by providing a cloud-based self-service data center solution,” said Brad Schick, VP of engineering at Skytap. “This recognition validates our innovation is leading the market and delivers IT agility and cost reduction to all of our customers.”

On the heels of a productive 2010, including raising an oversubscribed $10 million Series C round of funding, this award further positions Skytap as the leader in the enterprise cloud automation market. Evolving from a virtual lab service provider to a comprehensive cloud automation solution, Skytap has achieved 400 percent usage growth from last year, and has received numerous accolades based on the superiority of its cloud technology, such as inclusion on the IDC “Innovative Application Development and Deployment Company to Watch Under $100 Million,” SD Times100 and SearchCloudComputing Top 10 Cloud Computing Startups lists, as well as being named as a 2010 Best of VMWorld finalist.

The Products of the Year awards were presented by editors of TechTarget’s Data Center and Virtualization Media, and judged by the SearchServerVirtualization.com editorial staff, in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts and consultants. Winners were selected in five categories, including virtualization platforms, virtualization management, backup and storage for virtualization, virtualization security and desktop virtualization.

Last week, I spoke to Seth Goodling, Americas Virtualization Practice Manager for Acronis, about his company’s launch of its Global Disaster Recovery Index, a barometer that measures IT managers’ confidence in their backup and recovery operations.

“We wanted to start a barometer,” said Goodling, “that IT peers can use to compare their confidence in their backups, and share what they’re doing trend-wise with new technologies, so that they can gauge themselves with the rest of the world. We asked 30 questions in 13 countries—3000 IT pros and managers handling backup and disaster recovery plans.”

The survey revealed that although attitudes toward backup and recovery differ widely around the world, businesses everywhere want a single backup and recovery solution for physical, virtual, and cloud environments. The majority (68 percent) of IT managers agree that their greatest challenge in a hybrid environment is moving data between the three environments, yet the average business currently uses at least two or three separate backup solutions, thereby complicating disaster recovery.

Highlights

Acronis noted several takeaways from its survey.

Readiness. On the global scale, US-based SMBs fell short of the international average, ranking 10th overall for backup and disaster recovery readiness. “About a third of US businesses are entirely lacking the basics of a disaster recovery plan,” Goodling said. “They’re thinking, ‘We’re a small company, nothing can happen to us!’ but ultimately they’re going to realize that their data is just as important as that of an enterprise.” Most of these SMBs cite lack of budget and resources as their primary reasons.

Virtualization and the cloud. Most countries expect to increase their virtual server usage by around 50 percent over the next year. As businesses around the world adopt server virtualization, questions are emerging about system and file backup policies and practices in a hybrid physical/virtual environment. The study finds that the majority of those at the top of the Index place equal importance on regular physical and virtual backups. Without exception, businesses in the low-scoring countries place significantly less importance on the regularity of their virtual backups.

Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) claimed that they expected to have some form of cloud-based IT infrastructures in place by the end of 2010. While this rate of adoption seems impressive at first, cloud currently only represents around 16 percent of their IT infrastructure. However, over the next 12 months and by the end of 2011, this figure is expected to rocket upwards by 87 percent across all regions.

“People seem to be jumping in with both feet,” said Goodling. “Once they get into the technology, they’re getting to 100 percent pretty quickly.”

A single pane of glass. Organizations around the world are still struggling with getting some of the basics right. And what makes the world more complex is the fact that organizations are now presented with three different platforms for their disaster recovery strategies: physical, virtual, and cloud. Each platform has its own unique challenges and benefits.

“We’re seeing some companies that have as many as five backup plans/solutions,” Goodling says. “If they had one solution to back up everything—physical, cloud, virtualization—they’d have the ‘single pane of glass’ solution that would simplify their efforts.”

What SMBs are looking for, regardless of location, is one reliable, easy-to-use solution that spans physical, virtual, and cloud platforms. That way, business continuity becomes easier to manage.

Bad News for America

On a final note, businesses in the United States all scored poorly on their confidence in their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident. Their confidence in recovering quickly also fell far short of the Index leaders, Germany and the Netherlands. And as mentioned, approximately a third of businesses in United States don’t have an offsite backup and disaster recovery strategy in place. Lesson of the day? Make it a priority!

Turn on a TV, and you’ll see Microsoft running commercials touting something few men on the street know much about—cloud computing. So if the concept is starting to go mainstream, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of Seattle’s early movers in the space, Skytap, has already made some serious headway with its cloud computing offering in the past year.

Skytap made news yesterday when it said it pulled in a $10 million Series C venture round, led by Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners, and which included a trio of the company’s Seattle-based backers—Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, and the Washington Research Foundation. I chatted with CEO Scott Roza yesterday to find out more about what the company is really doing to collect that kind of cash.

The company was founded in 2006 by University of Washington computer science professors Brian Bershad, Hank Levy, and Steve Gribble, as well as grad student David Richardson, back when there most certainly weren’t TV commercials on cloud computing. The basic idea with the cloud is that customers rent servers on a pay-as-you-go basis, and get access to their data (and processing power) anytime over the Internet. It’s supposed to allow organizations to save money and headaches by not having to buy and maintain their own in-house servers and other equipment. The big boys of tech—Amazon, Microsoft, Google—are all duking it out for market share in the early days of what some analysts predict will grow into a $60 billion market based on this recent model of computing.

So where does a little company like Skytap, with 30 employees, fit into this equation? While the big players are providing the essential infrastructure, Skytap sees itself as a maker of software that sits on top of the cloud systems offered by the other guys. The software applications are supposed to make sure everything runs automatically and seamlessly, especially when engineers are testing a new product, and teams from multiple geographic locations are trying to collaborate. The software layer of the cloud computing market, where Skytap sees itself playing, is probably worth more like $4 to $8 billion over time, Roza says.

“The power of Skytap is in the software, not infrastructure,”

Roza says.

These are still very early days in the shift toward the cloud, and there’s a lot of curiosity among customers about what they might consider doing there, Roza says. Skytap has certainly had an interesting lens on how this market is evolving. The startup introduced its product about two and a half years ago. So far, early adopters on the IT side of organizations like Ellie Mae, Nuance Communications, Apptio, and Hargis Engineers have bought what Skytap is selling. Skytap also found its way into an important new stream of government agency customers last September when it struck a partnership with CSC (NYSE: CSC) to provide software for that company’s cloud-based development and test service.

Last year was a big one for market adoption, and that caught the eyes of the VCs. Skytap doubled its customer base, and has a goal of doing it again this year. The company doesn’t disclose its finances, but it has 150 customers now, and it’s close enough to profitability that the $10 million financing provides “indefinite runway,” Roza says. It’s possible that Skytap could double its headcount this year, through hiring sales and marketing people as well as more in R&D, Roza says.

But clearly, the new financing is really about taking a company that has cleared a lot of its early technical hurdles and pushing it forward into a bigger sales and marketing player. That’s why OpenView Venture Partners made sense as the lead investor, Roza says.

Interestingly, OpenView didn’t come to this story through connections to the earliest VCs. OpenView had been scoping out the cloud computing space for a while, identified Skytap in a Gartner Group report, and started doing its own digging. As he got to know senior managing director Scott Maxwell and the OpenView crew, Roza says he was intrigued by the firm’s track record with helping startups get to the next level with expansion capital. But interestingly, OpenView offered more than just a track record. It also can provide actual help in sales and marketing through what it calls “OpenView Labs.” This is basically a small group of people OpenView employs to test marketing messages on customers, and offer advice to portfolio companies on how to tweak messages to better match what the customers want.

This will be an interesting time to survey customer attitudes about cloud computing. The field is mainly growing on usage from early adopters, and on new computing projects—not so much on migrating existing projects from in-house servers to the cloud, Roza says. Prices of cloud computing infrastructure rates have come down, which certainly helps customers justify making the leap now when the economy is still weak. The classic question—to build it in-house, or buy a product—is the main thing that customers need to wrestle with when they decide whether or not to buy from Skytap, Roza says.

These are sophisticated customers Skytap is dealing with, at the levels of chief information officers or vice presidents of engineering. They may get swept up in buzz like anybody else who watches a Microsoft TV commercial, but for Skytap to be successful it needs to make a strong case that its cloud computing software can save companies more time, money, and staff headaches. If the company can put its new capital to work on that front, it will be on its way to becoming what Roza calls a “large independent company” in Seattle.

Of course, it’s still too early to say if that will really happen. A lot of fundamental things to any business need to happen first.

“You have to build a terrific product, and wow your customers every day so much they tell their peers,” Roza says. “If you do those things, the rest will take care of itself.”

ANDOVER, MA – Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions is enabling students and faculty at schools across North America to reliably use cloud-based learning tools. As educational facilities embrace the use of the Internet and cloud-based applications to enhance students’ learning and to support business and communications functions, school networks are being strained by the large amount of traffic being transmitted across their networks.

“Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions have helped hundreds of schools in North America and around the world to manage more traffic on their networks, and get the most out of the available bandwidth on their networks,” said Kevin Suitor, Exinda’s vice president of marketing. “In many cases, such as with the Dufferin-Peel School Board, we have helped IT and networking managers to see which applications are being used on the network, assign priority to the ones that are critical, and to defer the purchase of additional infrastructure or bandwidth—which has resulted in significant cost savings without compromising on the users’ experience.”

Exinda has released a case study detailing the Dufferin-Peel School Board installation of its WAN Optimization solutions. A copy of the case study is available on the company’s website.

Exinda’s Unified Performance Management Strategy

Exinda’s WAN Optimization solutions enable network managers to leverage Exinda’s unified performance management (UPM) solution, which offers network visibility, bandwidth control and application delivery optimization technologies within a single, easy to-use appliance. According to TRAC Research, organizations require visibility and control capabilities to ensure optimal performance over the network and to improve the user experience. Click here to request a copy of the research report.

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 invests heavily in ongoing Research and Development, which operates in our Melbourne, Australia facilities. 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 the website.

Orem, UT – AtTask, creators of the first true social work management platform and worldwide leader in on-demand project and portfolio management software, today announced record-breaking year end results for 2010 with the most successful 4th quarter in company history.

“Despite the continued weak market conditions globally, 2010 was an historic year for AtTask,” said Scott Johnson, founder & CEO of AtTask. “Our rich product roadmap and our ability to listen to our customers to deliver the best product possible, helped AtTask continue to grow despite soft market conditions.”

Highlights from the year include:

Sales – AtTask ended the year with the largest sales quarter ever and finished the year with 14% year over year growth

Customers – Addition of more than 350 new customers including numerous Fortune 500 companies in banking, high tech, entertainment, sporting goods and many other industries

Executive leadership – Positioned for accelerated growth with new additions to the executive management team including:

Jeff Allen, VP of Marketing

Karl Clegg, VP of Sales

Trevor Ward, GM of EMEA

Jody Baily, VP of Engineering

Bryan Nielson, VP of Product Management

Podcast – Launch of TalkingWork podcast and TalkingWork.com community site featuring the opinions and advice of thought leaders in the work management world

Website – Completely redesigned website launched

Awards – Third consecutive listing in the Inc. 500; named a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Global; recognized as one of Utah’s fastest growing companies – Fast 50 and Mountain West Capital Network (MWCN) 100; AtTask CFO Michael Olson named CFO of the Year by Utah Business Magazine

“We are off and running in the new year with a great deal of momentum from 2010,” continued Johnson. “Our annual work management summit—WorkOut 2011—is only weeks away, at the conference we’ll be announcing a new approach to managing work that is unlike anything else in the market. Expect big things from AtTask in 2011.”

WorkOut 2011 will be held at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, Feb. 7-10.

About AtTask, Inc.

AtTask increases workplace harmony by enfranchising workers and informing executives. The company’s social Work Management software gives people at all levels of the organization tools to help them better understand and organize their work. Going social facilitates deeper worker buy-in, and delivers executives conversational insights into the work environment. Over 1,000 organizations of all sizes, including Apple, Cisco (News – Alert), GE, Key Bank, HBO, Johnson & Johnson, Newsweek, Nike, Toyota and Whirlpool have turned to AtTask to manage work of all levels of complexity. Its on-demand work management solution is available in 7 languages.