More than a year after ExactTarget’s initial public offering, its venture investors are poised to reap big gains with the company’s proposed $2.5 billion sale to Salesforce.com.

The deal shows the growing importance of marketing software–a sector that has seen several recent, and large, acquisitions and dozens of venture capital investments as marketing and advertising shifts from an industry run on instincts to one that runs on data.

“Digital advertising and digital marketing is more important as more people go online and stay online through a big portion of the day,” said Scott Maxwell, a member of ExactTarget’s board.

Since 2009 ExactTarget has raised at least $175 million from its venture investors. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows an additional $40 million that the company has not confirmed.

None of the company’s venture investors sold any shares during ExactTarget’s March 2012 IPO. Most sold parts of their stakes in a secondary offering in September for $22.50 per share. They also let shares go over a period when the share price ranged from about $17 to $25, significantly less than Salesforce.com‘s $33.75 per share offer.

Greenspring Associates will be the big winner when the deal closes. Unlike other investors, it had picked up shares since ExactTarget’s IPO. The Salesforce deal values its holdings at $343.6 million.

Technology Crossover Ventures, the largest shareholder at the time of the IPO, still retains a stake worth $288.2 million. It has previously sold or distributed somewhere between $120 million and $141 million worth of stock.

Battery Ventures still holds $153 million of stock and has previously unloaded between $102 million and $127 million. Scale Venture Partnersholds $59.3 million and previously sold or distributed between $44 million and $55 million.

ExactTarget was founded in 2000 as an email marketing company serving midsized businesses. Since then it has expanded its offering, often through acquisitions, to position itself as a hub of many marketing channels and services, including social marketing, mobile marketing and marketing automation.

 

Instructure, an education startup set on knocking learning management system (LMS) Blackboard off its throne, has raised $30 million in a Series D financing round meant to help the company move closer to an eventual public offering.

The startup, which has previously raised about $20 million in venture financing, said the round included existing investors EPIC Ventures, OpenView Partners and TomorrowVentures, but was led by Bessemer Venture Partners – a firm chosen for its cachet, as well as its IPO expertise.

“That’s where we’re headed,” said CEO Josh Coates. “We are here to be a permanent, standalone company and get on the NASDAQ.”

In the last two years, he said, the company has closed about $92 million in contracts with more than 400 colleges, universities, K-12 schools and corporations. With its browser-based software, teachers and other clients can distribute class documents, encourage class collaboration, track student progress, grade assignments and carry out plenty of other course-related tasks.

Instructure still captures just a small part of the total LMS market, but it’s starting to show that it can be a contender to more established industry players likeBlackboard, Moodle and Desire2Learn. Coates said the new funding is intended to accelerate growth and product development and “throw gas on the fire.”

One area of particular interest for the company is its Canvas Network, a recently-launched service for creating and hosting online courses. While the national conversation around massive open online courses (MOOCs) has largely focused on Silicon Valley startups Coursera and Udacity, as well as the MIT- and Harvard-backed edX, Coates said Instructure is gaining traction with its own approach to the new kind of course format.

Since launching the Canvas Network in October, the company said 30 institutions have created 40 courses. (For now, all courses on the Canvas Network are free, but Coates suggested that options for generating revenue for schools could be on the horizon.) But, in contrast to its buzzier rivals, Instructure doesn’t just focus on hosting courses from elite schools, and it gives schools the flexibility to experiment with classes of different sizes and pedagogical approaches.  While Coursera recently launched partnerships with a group of state schools to explore a range of uses for MOOCs, it, like edX and Udacity, has mostly focused on a model that distributes content from top-tier universities to worldwide classes of tens of thousands of students.

“We want to use this tool as an experiment for our institutions,” Coates said. “We think it’s going to be a really powerful tool to educate in the future, but we don’t think it’s going to revolutionize education. We think it’s a component of education evolving.”

As for the IPO, while he said it’s the goal, the timing is sometime “in the next few years.”

“Wall Street is fickle and there are a lot of things to consider as we approach that goal,” Coates told me. “That’s the track we’re on but we’re focused on building a strong, healthy business, and when we’re ready to access the public markets that’s when we’ll do it.”

Prior to joining Exinda, Schreyer was the vice president of worldwide sales at Firetide, a leading provider of wireless mesh networks, where he led a team of regional sales managers, systems engineers and independent reps.

Schreyer was promoted from Firetide’s vice president of North American sales to vice president of worldwide sales where he increased revenue in excess of 300 percent worldwide. Previously, Schreyer was chief executive officer for Marketlink Technologies LLC, a company that links emerging technology companies with effective channel partners and end-users through its nationwide sales force.

According to an October, 2007 Gartner report entitled “Forecast: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 2005-2012,” the worldwide WAN optimization controller market will grow from US $972 million in 2007 to US $2.67 billion in 2012. Exinda, which conducts 100 percent of its sales through channel partners, is fully committed to providing training, technical support and leads necessary for reseller partners to be successful.

“The WAN optimization market in North America is ripe with business opportunities for resellers,” said Con Nikolouzakis, chief executive officer for Exinda Networks. “Stan will use his proven skills and experience to manage our reseller programs to benefit Exinda’s resellers and our joint customers.”

Exinda’s approach to WAN optimization, called Unified Performance Management, combines WAN optimization, application acceleration, application visibility and application response time measurement onto a single platform to achieve predictable application performance. Exinda is the only vendor to provide a global Web-hosted tool, called Service Delivery Point, for the simple, centralized management of its appliances distributed throughout corporate networks via a Web browser. Exinda’s solutions were designed to be easy to use and offer great control over network traffic at an affordable price.

“I’m very pleased to be part of the Exinda team, a world class organization,” said Schreyer. “Exinda has highly effective solutions. Together with our channel partners, we can help companies overcome their application delivery challenges.”

About Exinda

Exinda Networks is a global supplier of Unified Performance Management that integrates WAN optimization, application acceleration, application visibility and application response time measurements for enterprise, government and service provider clients. Founded in 2002, Exinda’s mission is to ensure optimal and consistent application performance over the WAN and reduce network operating costs. Exinda has more than 1,000 customers in more than 35 countries around the world. Exinda’s award winning technology is available by contacting leading resellers or Exinda directly.

Research and development offices are located in Melbourne, Australia. Exinda’s U.S. headquarters is located in Boston, Massachusetts. Additional corporate offices are located in Dubai, Frankfurt, London and Kuala Lumpur. For more information, visit http://www.exinda.com.

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced the availability of Skytap Automation Pack for IBM Rational Team Concert, a unique solution that enables IT operations and development teams to rapidly provision IBM build machines on-demand in Skytap Cloud.

This advanced integration expands the flexibility of IBM’s SmartCloud Continuous Delivery solution by allowing customers to use scalable, elastic and on-demand cloud resources to meet sporadic and unpredictable demand for build machine capacity. The new offering also eliminates the capital and labor expenditures required to buy, monitor and maintain physical hardware. Skytap will be providing live product demonstrations at IBM Innovate, Booth #E114, on June 2-6 in Orlando.

“The most universal driver for DevOps continues to be speed and the time to iterate, to deploy and to get software, features, services and updates to market,” said Jay Lyman, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, at 451 Research. “In addition, while drivers such as cost reduction through efficiency are still significant, most enterprise and service provider organizations are viewing DevOps and the ability to rapidly iterate both infrastructure and software as a competitive necessity.”

Skytap Automation Pack for IBM Rational Team Concert

The Skytap Automation Pack is software that installs alongside the IBM Jazz Team Server. The Automation Pack continuously monitors the build request queue, and incoming build requests trigger an automated process that creates complete build environments in Skytap Cloud based on pre-defined customer templates. The Skytap Automation Pack enables on-premise IBM Rational infrastructure to connect to Skytap Cloud via a secure VPN connection over IPsec, which is dynamically created using Skytap’s AutoNetworks™ software-defined networking technology. Skytap Cloud serves as a secure extension of on-premise infrastructure, empowering customers with the flexibility to migrate additional resource elements into a hybrid cloud environment.

Benefits for software development professionals include:

• Create identical build and unit testing environments in Skytap Cloud on-demand
• Increase (or decrease) the number of build environments with auto-scaling
• Collaborate with teams working in parallel on separate components of a product with consistent build environments that operate on the latest golden version of components
• Provision fully-automated build environments, eliminating the need to worry about the underlying infrastructure and automatically creating virtual machines on the fly
• Scale the underlying infrastructure with the growth of team, complexity, and product
• Access virtual machines remotely via SmartClient™ or any native RDP-capable client
• Share complete environments and creatively collaborate via publish URL capability
• Scale resources (CPU, memory, network) up and down on-demand

Benefits for IT infrastructure and operations teams include:

• Integrate existing on-premise IBM Rational Team Concert Server environments seamlessly with Skytap Cloud resources
• Empower end-user teams to easily spin-up, run, and tear down complete testing environments on-demand, without IT management or intervention
• Enforce network isolation and control on-premise enterprise user access
• Maintain complete IT visibility and control – role-based access, quotas, notifications, and reporting

“While DevOps professionals are hesitant to abandon tried-and-true on-premise solutions, external cloud resources have proven to drastically reduce software delivery cycles and accelerate time-to-market,” said Brian White, VP of products at Skytap. “The Skytap Automation Pack for IBM Rational Team Concert combines the sought-after scalability and flexibility of a hybrid cloud with the popular IBM development tools utilized by some of the world’s leading enterprises.”

About Skytap, Inc.

Skytap is the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions for dynamic workloads. Skytap Cloud gives businesses a fast, easy, and secure way to create complex computing environments in the cloud. Customers can run enterprise applications unchanged in the cloud, collaborate securely with global teams, and gain unparalleled business productivity. Additionally, IT organizations maintain full visibility and control over cloud projects, align capacity with demand, and reduce costs. Enterprises can securely connect Skytap Cloud to their data centers and create hybrid clouds. Skytap is ideal for any dynamic workload including development and testing, software demos and evaluations, and virtual training.

Acronis® today announced that it has joined the Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program with the integration of its secure mobile file management software mobilEcho® with Citrix MDX technology.

Acronis mobilEcho will soon be made available worldwide to more than 250,000 existing Citrix enterprise customers and 10,000 Citrix resellers on the Citrix Worx App Gallery to further the accessibility, availability and protection of critical data on enterprise mobile devices.

Citrix MDX technology allows IT to set comprehensive policy-based controls such as data leakage prevention and the ability to remote lock, wipe and encrypt apps and data. Enterprise IT teams can then apply security and access policies to participating Worx applications, including mobilEcho, across any iOS™ and Android™ device.

Andy Purvis, General Manager, ANZ for Acronis said: “As more personal devices are added to enterprise environments, security becomes a top concern as IT strives to ensure critical data is safe from leakage, malware and hackers.

“The integration of mobilEcho with the Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program will help IT organisations safely embrace mobile trends in the workplace while improving the security of their overall mobile strategy. This is ultimately what we all hope to achieve, and we’re excited to be teaming up with Citrix with this goal in mind.”

To extend the product as enterprise ready, Acronis used the Citrix Worx SDK to easily embed MDX technology in its mobilEcho app, extending the product as a secure solution to Citrix customers using any Android or iOS based device. Citrix MDX technology allows end users to maintain direct, secure access to the mobilEcho app while enabling IT to enforce the data-security and data-access rights required by their organization. This integration will further help mobility IT managers manage the growing number of mobile apps end users are adopting for productivity and on-demand data access.

Chris Fleck, VP Mobility Solutions and Alliances, Citrix said: “We have recognised a huge opportunity in the mobility space for our customers and the industry, and want to ensure enterprise security concerns are addressed. mobilEcho is a great addition to our Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program and a perfect example of a secure, easy-to-use application that allows users to enhance their productivity from anywhere on any device.”

mobilEcho enables IT organisations to provide iOS or Android mobile device users with the identical secure and managed access to files and content on enterprise file servers, SharePoint® and NAS storage, as they experience from their laptop or desktop. This includes the ability to edit, annotate and collaborate on any documents. Access rights are integrated with Active Directory® to ease management and support compliance.

About Citrix

Citrix is the cloud company that enables mobile workstyles—empowering people to work and collaborate from anywhere, securely accessing apps and data on any of the latest devices, as easily as they would in their own office. Citrix solutions help IT and service providers build clouds, leveraging virtualisation and networking technologies to deliver high-performance, elastic and cost-effective cloud services. With market-leading solutions for mobility, desktop virtualisation, cloud networking, cloud platforms, collaboration and data sharing, Citrix products are in use at more than 260,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Annual revenue in 2012 was $2.59 billion.

About Acronis

Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today’s complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organizations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data, and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organizations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac® in the enterprise.

Acronis® is a registered trademark of Acronis International GmbH. in the United States and/or other countries. Mac® and iOS™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Active Directory® and SharePoint® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademark rights are retained by their respective owners.

Acronis® today announced that it has joined the Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program with the integration of its secure mobile file management software mobilEcho® with Citrix MDX technology.

Acronis mobilEcho will soon be made available worldwide to more than 250,000 existing Citrix enterprise customers and 10,000 Citrix resellers on the Citrix Worx App Gallery to further the accessibility, availability and protection of critical data on enterprise mobile devices.

Citrix MDX technology allows IT to set comprehensive policy-based controls such as data leakage prevention and the ability to remote lock, wipe and encrypt apps and data. Enterprise IT teams can then apply security and access policies to participating Worx applications, including mobilEcho, across any iOS™ and Android™ device.

Andy Purvis, General Manager, ANZ for Acronis said: “As more personal devices are added to enterprise environments, security becomes a top concern as IT strives to ensure critical data is safe from leakage, malware and hackers.

“The integration of mobilEcho with the Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program will help IT organisations safely embrace mobile trends in the workplace while improving the security of their overall mobile strategy. This is ultimately what we all hope to achieve, and we’re excited to be teaming up with Citrix with this goal in mind.”

To extend the product as enterprise ready, Acronis used the Citrix Worx SDK to easily embed MDX technology in its mobilEcho app, extending the product as a secure solution to Citrix customers using any Android or iOS based device. Citrix MDX technology allows end users to maintain direct, secure access to the mobilEcho app while enabling IT to enforce the data-security and data-access rights required by their organization. This integration will further help mobility IT managers manage the growing number of mobile apps end users are adopting for productivity and on-demand data access.

Chris Fleck, VP Mobility Solutions and Alliances, Citrix said: “We have recognised a huge opportunity in the mobility space for our customers and the industry, and want to ensure enterprise security concerns are addressed. mobilEcho is a great addition to our Citrix Ready Worx Verified partner program and a perfect example of a secure, easy-to-use application that allows users to enhance their productivity from anywhere on any device.”

mobilEcho enables IT organisations to provide iOS or Android mobile device users with the identical secure and managed access to files and content on enterprise file servers, SharePoint® and NAS storage, as they experience from their laptop or desktop. This includes the ability to edit, annotate and collaborate on any documents. Access rights are integrated with Active Directory® to ease management and support compliance.

About Citrix

Citrix is the cloud company that enables mobile workstyles—empowering people to work and collaborate from anywhere, securely accessing apps and data on any of the latest devices, as easily as they would in their own office. Citrix solutions help IT and service providers build clouds, leveraging virtualisation and networking technologies to deliver high-performance, elastic and cost-effective cloud services. With market-leading solutions for mobility, desktop virtualisation, cloud networking, cloud platforms, collaboration and data sharing, Citrix products are in use at more than 260,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Annual revenue in 2012 was $2.59 billion.

About Acronis

Acronis is leading the next wave of data availability, accessibility and protection solutions to simplify today’s complex IT environments. Acronis technology enables organizations of all sizes to manage the always-on anywhere data access demands of users, reducing risk against the loss of valuable corporate data, and controlling management and storage costs. With proven technology for data migration and disaster recovery for physical, virtual and cloud environments, and secure enterprise file-sharing and synchronization regardless of type or platform, Acronis is enabling organizations to embrace new IT strategies and options such as BYOD and Mac® in the enterprise.

Acronis® is a registered trademark of Acronis International GmbH. in the United States and/or other countries. Mac® and iOS™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Android is a trademark of Google Inc. Active Directory® and SharePoint® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademark rights are retained by their respective owners.

OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support, announced today the release of a new report entitled, “Measuring Up: 9 Sales Benchmarks that Can Help Expansion-Stage Companies Build a Scalable Sales Machine.”

Targeted at the CEOs and heads of sales at expansion-stage technology companies, the report provides guideposts for establishing initial sales performance expectations and measuring your performance against them.

“By allowing companies to better evaluate and understand their own metrics, sales benchmarks can give executives and managers a much better sense of what to expect when launching a customer acquisition initiative into a new market or when building out a sales team,” explained Devon McDonald, Director of Sales and Marketing Support at OpenView. “Ultimately, those insights can help companies manage a variety of challenges, such as analyzing sales funnel activity, developing a scalable customer acquisition model, and addressing impediments in new markets.”

The sales benchmarks covered in the OpenView report span two categories:

1) Lead generation team performance sales benchmarks, which are critical to analyzing an existing lead generation team’s performance and to efficiently building new teams. They include the following conversion rates:

•     Call to conversation
•     Conversation to appointment
•     Appointment to opportunity
•     Lead to opportunity

2) Sales team capacity and productivity sales benchmarks, which can be used as a frame of reference to ensure that you are hiring the right number of lead generation reps, are leveraging those reps effectively, and that you are encouraging sales activities that ultimately fuel optimal financial performance. They include:

•     Number of open opportunities per sales rep
•     Pipeline coverage
•     Opportunity win rate on new customer deals
•     Pipeline slippage
•     Number of new customer deals won per rep

“After reading this report, you will have a better understanding of the metrics your company needs to track in order to hire, manage, and scale its sales organization effectively, and whether or not you are on pace with industry averages,” said McDonald. “Ultimately, the most important take away is that it’s essential for your sales organization to track these benchmarks. The calculations for them are universal and measuring them is absolutely critical to successfully scaling an expansion-stage sales organization. Over time, the data that doing so yields will allow you to create your own sales benchmarks, which will provide the best context for your business going forward.”

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused 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 quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $440 million in total capital under management.

About OpenView Labs

OpenView Labs is the strategic and operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund that invests in expansion-stage technology companies. The Labs team consults to the management of OpenView’s portfolio companies across an array of functional areas, including recruiting, go-to-market support, and research and analytics. Together with its network of senior advisors, the team supports OpenView’s portfolio companies on a range of initiatives ranging from methodology incubation and market research, to providing strategic coaching.

TicketCity, a trusted source for tickets to more than 75,000 sports, concerts, and theatre events today announced a partnership with leading social marketing software provider Spredfast that will enhance TicketCity’s social customer experience.

With nearly 2 in 5 online consumers now following retailers through one or more social networking sites, the new partnership expands TicketCity’s ability to engage an increasingly social customer base.

“Today, brands face the challenge of engaging with their customer base across social media in a way that not only meets the community’s needs and expectations, but also drives meaningful business impact”

Spredfast’s social media management system allows TicketCity to manage and measure the impact of the organization’s presence on multiple social networks from one centralized location, increasing the relevancy and effectiveness of customer communications. Additionally, Spredfast enables TicketCity to coordinate communication between social media community managers, customer service specialists and the sales team in order to efficiently manage customer service issues and improve response time on social channels.

“Social media plays an important role in the purchasing process for today’s digital consumer,” said Meredith Owen, Communications Director at TicketCity. “From initial product awareness to post-purchase customer care, consumers increasingly use their social networks to engage with brands. Spredfast allows us to effectively engage with our customers at every stage in the process in a way that is scalable for our business.”

“Today, brands face the challenge of engaging with their customer base across social media in a way that not only meets the community’s needs and expectations, but also drives meaningful business impact,” said Rod Favaron, Spredfast CEO. “We are helping TicketCity do both with a platform that allows their social team to engage proactively and reactively with their community, while also providing visibility into activity, audience and interaction trends to prove how their increased engagement is impacting sales and brand awareness.”

About TicketCity

TicketCity is a trusted source for tickets to more than 75,000 sports, concerts, and theatre events around the world. TicketCity’s established supplier network provides clients with premier access to events including the Masters, Kentucky Derby and US Grand Prix. With on-location staff at all major events, TicketCity’s industry leading customer service is supported by a team of event specialists and a money-back guarantee. TicketCity has partnerships with 13 championship games, 12 FBS schools and 3 professional teams, as well as media and business organizations such as CBSSports.com, IBM, and BazaarVoice.

About Spredfast

Based in Austin, Texas, Spredfast provides social media management software that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their social media programs at scale. Spredfast enables more people, in more places, to engage in more conversations from a single platform on supported social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, and popular blogging platforms. Some of the enterprise and agency adopters on board with Spredfast include AT&T, Jason’s Deli, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, Coty Beauty, HomeAway and WCG. For more information, visit www.spredfast.com.