Pantheon, one of the largest managed hosting platforms for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it has acquired NodeSquirrel, a backup service for Drupal sites. The service originally started as an extension for Drupal, which is currently in use by over 300,000 sites. Going forward, Pantheon will continue to invest in the product and it’s raising the caps on all of NodeSquirrel’s free and paid tiers.

“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies make this an incredible opportunity,” said Drew Gorton, co-founder of NodeSquirrel. Gorton and his co-founder Ronan Dowling, who wrote the first version of the open source Backup and Migrate extension at the core of the service more than seven years ago, will join the Pantheon team, as well as a number of other core contributors.

NodeSquirrel launched in 2012 and supports backups to any FTP server, Amazon’s S3 storage service and, of course, NodeSquirrel’s own storage service. Pantheon plans to bring support for incremental backups and large file footprints to the service.

Maybe thanks to the popularity of Backup and Migrate, there aren’t a lot of specialized commercial Drupal backup services on the market. WordPress users can choose from a wider variety of vendors, including the likes of blogVault and WordPress.com’s own VaultPress.

Too many website owners, however, are still backing up their sites locally — which really isn’t a backup at all. Pantheon users already get offsite backups as part of their plans, but as Pantheon CEO and co-founder Zack Rosen says, “acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet.”

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. As far as we are aware, NodeSquirrel never took any outside investment.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (PRWEB) May 06, 2015 — Leading expansion-stage B2B venture capital firm, OpenView Venture Partners, announced today the addition of John McCullough as the firm’s first-ever Director of Corporate Development. In this new role, McCullough will work to proactively build relationships and facilitate conversations between OpenView portfolio companies and potential strategic partners, drive M&A outcomes and help strengthen business and corporate development activities within the portfolio. McCullough’s dedication to facilitating conversations between the portfolio and potential buyers makes his addition to the team yet another unique value-add offered by OpenView.

Prior to joining OpenView, McCullough served in a similar role at Rocket Software, a global enterprise software company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. At Rocket, McCullough drove business development activities and executed strategic acquisitions, including public company carve-outs, stock purchases and cross-border transactions. McCullough, who holds an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, will focus on many of the same responsibilities at OpenView, but with a heavier focus on serving as a liaison between strategic partners and the firm’s portfolio.

“I was immediately drawn to OpenView because of the firm’s incredible reputation as a true value-add investor. The opportunity to establish a new role not only at OpenView, but within the VC community is especially exciting,” said McCullough. “Too often conversations between potential acquirers and portfolio companies happen on a sporadic, one-off basis, and I’m looking forward to streamlining this process for all parties.”

By establishing a new role dedicated to outreach and engagement with strategic acquirers and partners, OpenView hopes to bring more structure and purpose to the M&A and corporate development processes.

“John’s addition to the team creates huge value for both strategic acquirers and our portfolio,” said OpenView founder and managing partner Scott Maxwell. “This new role enables portfolio companies to establish early relationships with parties that can help them grow or potentially acquire their businesses. We’re excited to have John on board as yet another unique benefit to our portfolio.”

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion-stage venture capital firm based in Boston that invests exclusively in B2B software companies. In addition to its investment team, OpenView also has a dedicated team of 15 consultants who work with its portfolio companies to help them scale faster and more efficiently than competitors (http://www.openviewlabs.com). Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has nearly $700 million in total capital under management.

Signpost is announcing that it has raised $20.5 million in Series C funding.

The company offers consumer marketing tools; it manages customers’ presence on sites like Yelp, and it uses data from things like credit card transactions and social media to send targeted marketing messages that drive sales, referrals and reviews.

Signpost also says that once it’s set up, this all happens automatically.

When I wrote about the company back in 2013, it was focused on serving small businesses. It seems that Signpost’s vision has expanded since then. It now bills itself as “automated CRM for B2C businesses.”

The new funding was led by Georgian Partners, with participation from Spark Capital, OpenView Venture Partners, Scout Ventures and Launch Fund.

You can read more in this company blog post.

SEATTLE, Wash. – Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS), today announced the Skytap Mobile Admin App for iOS, which puts the power of Skytap in the hands of IT leaders whether they are in the office or on the go. From a smartphone, Skytap administrators can now manage their team’s usage of cloud-based dev/test, training and demo environments, to increase efficiency and control cloud resource costs.

The consumerization of IT has led the next generation of IT leaders to expect the same technology tools and ease of use in the workplace that they’ve become accustomed to in their daily lives. A recent IDG study found that 83 percent of enterprise organizations are planning to invest in mobile technology over the next year to make the most of this shift. Skytap’s new mobile app delivers on this promise and initial feedback has been positive.

“I have been using a pre-release version of this app for a few months and it has been solid. I use it for managing many aspects of our Skytap cloud, including firing up the systems that I need while on the bus on my way to work. It is often the first tool I reach for when someone needs help with a system residing in Skytap; usually it is the only tool I need!” said Bill Wellington, networks and systems administrator for DevOps at Fulcrum Technologies. “If you administer Skytap resources for your company this is a must have tool.”

Skytap’s mobile app provides administrator-level Skytap users with smartphone access to several core capabilities, including:

Real-Time Management of Environments

Admin users can view the status of their environments and leverage a lineup of features for the real-time management of their Skytap resources. Through a user-friendly mobile dashboard, users can:

• Save costs by monitoring environment run states and shut them down when they aren’t in use
• Create new environments from the Skytap template library
• Add new environments to existing projects or change environment ownership
• Copy environments to different regions via Skytap’s Copy to Region functionality

Quota Management

Skytap’s mobile app provides IT administrators and operations teams with access to their visibility and control tools, enabling them to manage virtual machine and storage usage. Instant alerts prompt administrators to monitor usage and adjust limits as needed 24 hours a day, ensuring that systems are not left idle and driving up costs.

Administrative Features

The app also provides quick access to commonly employed admin functions, including the ability to:

• Filter and assign environments by project
• Access integrated support options
• Open the application direct from notification emails
• View VM desktop screens and thumbnails on the phone

“With the Skytap mobile app we’ve accomplished our vision of providing admins with a user-friendly app that’s similar to the ones they use in their everyday lives — complete with all the essentials,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “The mobile app represents yet another milestone in our quest to drive innovation in the cloud. We’ll continue to evolve our mobile offering to meet customer needs and are on track to release the app on the Android platform in the coming months.”

The Skytap mobile app is free to download and install, and uses a customer’s current Skytap administrator-level login to sync to environments. An Android version of the app, currently in beta, will be available on the Android Store in April 2015. The iOS version of the app can be downloaded at:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skytap-admin/id960310195?ls=1&mt=8/.

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap provides Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to transform the software development lifecycle and help customers deliver better software, faster. Today’s enterprise is challenged to continuously deliver new customer-facing applications, while overcoming increasing change and complexity in IT infrastructures. Our customers use Skytap to manage, share, deploy and decommission on-demand environments that contain everything needed to collaborate at each phase of the SDLC, without unnecessary costs and project delays due to manual configuration and dependencies. Enterprise IT organizations maintain full visibility and cost control, while allowing dev and test teams to self-provision labs and share complex environments with ease, for a lasting boost to agile DevOps initiatives. To try Skytap and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

DEDHAM, Mass. — Sonian, a pioneer in cloud-based archiving, today announced the appointment of Robert A. Steinkrauss, a technology executive with more than 35 years of leadership experience, to its board of directors. Steinkrauss will serve as an independent director, expanding the board to six members.

“It’s an exciting time to be joining this board along with Tim McKinnon as the new CEO,” said Steinkrauss. “The value of cloud-based archiving has never been more real to enterprises as they grapple to overcome the challenges of storing, retrieving and leveraging the vast amount of business data generated each day. As a pioneer in the field, Sonian is at the forefront of this opportunity.”

For more than 35 years, Steinkrauss has provided strategic direction, vision and management to a number of successful ventures in the technology industry. A veteran of the security and networking markets, Steinkrauss previously served as the president and chief executive officer of Chosen Security, Raptor Systems, Xedia and Ingrian Networks, Inc. He has also served as the managing director of TC TrustCenter GmbH.

“Bob brings nearly four decades of experience guiding technology companies, which will prove invaluable to our success,” said Daniel Demmer, Sonian board member. “We grew revenue more than 30 percent year over year in 2014, and 2015 will be marked by strong product innovation. We look forward to working with Bob and benefiting from his deep insight and experience.”

Steinkrauss serves as an independent director for NextDocs Corporation, Exinda, Xtium, Agiliance and Ipswitch. He was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2007 for the Northern California region and in 1997 for the New England Region. A magna cum laude graduate of Boston College, Steinkrauss holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science in accounting. He is a Certified Public Accountant.

About Sonian

An early innovator in cloud-based archiving, Sonian preserves, protects and presents the world’s information. More than 19,000 customers in 40 countries trust Sonian’s secure platform and fast and accurate search to retain and retrieve valuable data and to protect the intellectual property in business email. Sonian manages more than 20 billion objects in the cloud; every day, 17 million new documents are uploaded to Sonian’s cloud archives, which can run on any of the world’s five largest public clouds. Boasting strong partnerships with the world’s leading technology companies, Sonian combines innovative technology with deep archiving expertise to satisfy customers of all sizes and industries. For more information, please visit www.sonian.com.