Xtium, Inc., a leading enterprise software and solutions company providing managed cloud hosting, online backup, and virtual disaster recovery services, today announced its expanding partnership with YASH Technologies, a leading technology services and outsourcing partner for global companies.

For over three years, Xtium and YASH have partnered to offer hosted SAP environments. With more organizations moving applications to the cloud, YASH is able to leverage the partnership to offer its customers an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution that enables the SAP applications suite to be highly available, secure and scalable.

In December, YASH was awarded 2012 SAP Integrator of the Year as part of Xtium’s customer and partner recognition awards for YASH’s visionary leadership in the area of application managed services.

“YASH’s customers are able to quickly spin up their new SAP environments with very low upfront costs, paying for only the resources that they use as they go through the implementation process,” said Shawn Carey, co-founder and vice president, business development, Xtium. “As we seek to expand ourpartner program in 2013, we are excited to continue growing our relationship with YASH to drive more business for both companies.”

Xtium and YASH currently share a number of customers throughout North America, representing substantial monthly recurring revenue for both companies.

“We are pleased to be expanding our business relationship with Xtium,” said Jacinto Arauz, vice president, software sales, YASH. “Our partnership with Xtium has been rewarding as Xtium enables YASH to provide delivery options of SAP solutions to customers.”

About Xtium

Xtium is a leading enterprise software and solutions company innovating managed cloud hosting, online backup and virtual disaster recovery services. We offer companies the most secure virtual private cloud experience with guaranteed application performance across the network. Our architecture is flexible, allowing customers to remain in control. We are the only enterprise service company certified to deliver, SAP®, VMware® and Riverbed® technologies. To learn more, please visit http://www.xtium.com.

About YASH Technologies

YASH Technologies focuses on customer success. As a leading technology services and outsourcing partner for medium and large global customers, YASH leverages technology and flexible delivery models to drive performance and business value throughout a customer’s enterprise. YASH’s comprehensive service approach incorporates a holistic view of its customers that extends beyond delivery. This approach integrates enterprise solutions and services, proprietary best practice offerings, strategic application and maintenance outsourcing, as well as consulting and integration services. YASH is a SEI CMMI (Level 3) and an ISO 9001:2008 certified company with U.S. and India headquarters and regional sales and development offices spread across five continents. For more information, please visit http://www.yash.com or email info(at)yash(dot)com.

Contact:

Jen Wozniak
jennifer.wozniak(at)xtium(dot)com
215-297-4142

OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support, released a new report today entitled, “User Adoption: Where Product Strategy, Customer Service, and Marketing Intersect.”

The report outlines best practices that software companies can use to promote stronger user adoption among both paying and trial users.

“Expansion-stage companies put a huge amount of focus on acquiring new users,” said Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs, the firm’s strategic consulting arm. “However, they also need to pay as much, if not more, attention to their actual users. By driving user adoption, companies can make their products stickier within organizations, increase the likelihood that people will use them, and provide much-needed traction as their businesses grow.”

The report examines three user adoption techniques — gamification, educational content, and customer outreach — that technology companies can use to improve user adoption and product engagement. It goes on to cite examples of how three leading technology companies, Autodesk, Mindjet, and Zendesk are using these tactics successfully.

“This report will help product, marketing, and customer service executives launch a collaborative user adoption initiative,” Zimmerman continued. “That in turn will allow them to improve customer retention rates, grow customer accounts, and increase the likelihood of customer referrals.”

OpenView’s reports span a variety of topics, including technology, venture capital, marketing, and sales, and are created from the research OpenView Labs conducts in support of its portfolio companies. To download free copies of any of them, visit the OpenView Labs site or simply sign up for OpenView’s free weekly newsletter to have the firm’s reports and other operationally focused content delivered to you every week.

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.

Aepona and Mashery today announced a partnership that will allow Aepona’s Service Provider customers to reach Mashery’s 185,000-strong enterprise developer ecosystem, bringing valuable mobile network capabilities and intelligence to a wide range of enterprise applications via APIs.

For enterprise IT, the age of connected devices and developer innovation translates into a need to increase productivity, reduce costs, improve customer service and drive sales – all while facing increased employee mobility, device and OS proliferation, as well as the huge shifts occurring with employee-liable devices and apps moving to the Cloud.

Web-based APIs are the scalable answer to accessing critical business applications and processes across device types and operating systems. Service Provider capabilities such as communications, context, commerce and control will play a key role in addressing these challenges, and the Aepona/Mashery partnership opens up a new channel for Service Providers to participate in the enterprise app economy.

The partnership between Mashery and Aepona creates a new solution, the Aepona AMP Enterprise Connector, offered by Aepona to Service Providers. The solution integrates Aepona’s award-winning API Monetization Platform (AMP) with Mashery’s SaaS-based API Management platform technologies, including the market’s premier developer portal to increase engagement with developer communities, API Packager to allow business-side management of APIs as products, plus robust reporting and analytics to drive value tracking of API initiatives.

“Service Providers around the world are opening their networks to developers through APIs, and are gradually building their own developer communities and application ecosystems”, said Al Snyder, CEO of Aepona.

“However, they increasingly recognize that enterprises and business applications will be a key revenue driver for their services going forward. By launching the AMP Enterprise Connector in collaboration with Mashery, Aepona can help them tap into this opportunity on a global scale, quickly and cost-effectively. Our AMP solution is designed to allow Service Providers to bring their assets to market across multiple channels, and the AMP Enterprise Connector represents a major new channel to developers for Aepona’s customers.”

“The past year has seen the emergence of accelerated enterprise API use, as more companies realize the business impact of connecting to partners and creating new revenue channels with APIs”, said Oren Michels, CEO and co-founder of Mashery. “The combination of Mashery’s API Management and Aepona’s technology for communications APIs open up a whole range of business-critical API functions, from transactions to analytics and big telco data value tracking.”

About Aepona

Aepona’s awarding-winning software platform bridges the enterprise with the network, enabling Service Providers to offer communications, context, commerce and control features that enrich business applications using cloud-based APIs. This allows Service Providers to monetize their assets in new ways, and enterprises to easily embed mobile intelligence into a diverse range of applications. Founded in 1999, Aepona is a privately held, venture capital-backed company with main offices in the UK (Belfast), the US (Denver, CO) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), with global operations serving Communications Service Provider customers worldwide.

About Mashery

Mashery, the world’s leading provider of API Management technology and services, helps securely power 56,000 apps for more than 175 top brands—including USA TODAY, Comcast, Dun & Bradstreet, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Aetna, CapitalOne and Expedia. Only Mashery offers enterprises a PCI-DSS Compliant API Management platform to build API-powered platforms for opening new distribution channels, speeding time-to-market, and spurring innovation. Mashery focuses on API success, from crafting platform strategy and setting business objectives, to managing API delivery and facilitating relationships with a network of 185,000 developers. Mashery was founded in 2006.

For further information contact:

For Aepona:
Michael Crossey
Chief Marketing Officer
E: [email protected]
T: +44 7734 318210
www.aepona.com

For Mashery:
David Conner
PR Director
E: [email protected]
T: +1 415 625 0091
www.mashery.com

The Mississippi Community College Board and the state’s 15 community colleges recently selected Canvas by Instructure as the learning platform for the Mississippi Virtual Community College (MSVCC).

This partnership marks the beginning of a five-year engagement with Instructure, an innovative company in eLearning technology. Canvas will provide the critical tools necessary to ensure that the MSVCC accomplishes its strategic goals centered around teaching and learning. Because Canvas runs in “the cloud,” MSVCC will recognize a cost savings of approximately $1.5 million per year. The MSVCC is expected to “go live” on the Canvas platform beginning with the summer 2013 term.

“We welcome Mississippi’s 15 community colleges to the Canvas community,” said Devlin Daley , Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Instructure. “Canvas was created for students and teachers to more easily connect and learn together. We’re excited to leverage the Canvas platform to enable learners to connect across the entire consortium in support of MSVCC’s unique eLearning model. Canvas bridges the technology gap between siloed systems at each campus enabling students to take courses seamlessly from all other consortium colleges.”

After an extensive evaluation process, Instructure scored highest among a number of potential vendors. Canvas stood out with the openness of its platform and the fact that it was user-friendly.  The product also has a great aesthetic look and feel that community college students and faculty should find easy to navigate.

The MSVCC is a collaborative effort among all 15 community colleges to offer the full array of academic, career, and technical courses necessary to earn an Associate of Arts or an Associate of Applied Sciences online. The MSVCC dates back to fall 2001 and is recognized nationally as among the best eLearning models in the nation. During the initial launch of the MSVCC, a total of 4,781 students were enrolled in 8,281 classes. During the fall 2012 semester, 28,576 students took 60,883 classes.

“The MSVCC is a great resource of our community colleges, and we are excited about our new relationship with Instructure,” said Dr. Eric Clark , executive director of the Mississippi Community College Board.  “We are saving a significant amount of money by moving our learning management system to the cloud. Our community college system strives to be good stewards of Mississippi’s tax dollars, and this is a wonderful example of that commitment.”

Mississippi community colleges were founded on the principle of accessibility, and the switch to Canvas will help MSVCC promote this concept. As a rural state, some citizens face difficulties in enrolling in higher education classes such as full-time, low-paying jobs; distance to a community college campus; or lack of dependable transportation.

The MSVCC allows students, wherever they are, to enroll in community college classes, receive the same support from an instructor as if they were taking a brick-and-mortar class, and earn credit towards an associate’s degree or transfer to a university.  An educated citizenry is critical to the success of a region, and the MSVCC is a great resource that is improving the educational level of Mississippians which results in a better state.

“I am excited about working with the Canvas platform to provide vital services to the MSVCC,” added Dr. Christian Pruett , Assistant Executive Director for eLearning and Instructional Technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. “Instructure is a national leader in providing top-notch services for online learning. Our partnership will allow the MSVCC to continue to provide outstanding distance education opportunities for our students.”

For more information about the MSVCC, visit www.msvcc.squarespace.com.

About Instructure:

Instructure is a technology company committed to improving education. We provide instructors and students modern tools and resources to empower the learning experience. Instructure offers Canvas – the open, easy-to-use, cloud-native learning management system. We also provide Canvas Network, an index of open, online courses from Ivy Leagues to community colleges. To keep learning, visit www.instructure.com.

Contact:

Kell Smith, Mississippi Community College Board, 601-432-6734
Devin Knighton, Instructure, 801-722-8187

Enterprise teams are overrun with point solutions, which result in fragmented tools, silos of information, and team inefficiencies.

AtTask, the industry’s only Enterprise Work Management solution, has simplified the complexities of collaborative work by creating integration scenarios with leading online document management solutions to deliver seamless workflows for enterprise teams in a unified collaboration and work environment.

Integrations enhance AtTask’s enterprise work management platform

“We are excited to enable enterprise teams to better manage the overall chaos of work,” said Eric Morgan, AtTask CEO. “By focusing on our customers’ needs, and leveraging our years of experience, we’ve created integrations that focus on real departmental work scenarios to create a seamless workflow. All of this is done in the context of the entire lifecycle of work.”

The AtTask seamless connections with Box, Dropbox and Google:

• Eliminates the inefficiencies of switching between multiple tools
• Provides peace of mind by tracking the most current version of every document
• Increases efficiencies by killing email as the main source of document collaboration
• Breaks down barriers between people and teams by providing improved visibility

Thousands of enterprise teams use AtTask to manage and collaborate on their work

Enterprise teams are turning to easy-to-use and deploy online document management solutions to solve document sharing and storage issues. Unfortunately, this easy deployment capability just makes it easier to add the inefficiency of having yet another silo of information. AtTask solves this problem by connecting these tools directly into the context of work and collaboration, which results in a streamlined and connected workflow.

Morgan continued, “Leveraging multiple tools for document management created a headache and inefficiencies for our customers. With these integrations, we have empowered our customers to leverage AtTask as their single system of truth.”

Additional Resources:

• Watch the way AtTask integrates with document management solutions: http://www.attask.com/product/integrations-video
• Learn more about the AtTask approach to integrations: www.attask.com/product/integrations
• Hear AtTask CEO Eric Morgan talk about Enterprise Work Management: http://www.attask.com/ewm-vision

About AtTask

AtTask is the only provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solutions for enterprise teams. This provides a single, central place to better manage and control the chaos of enterprise work, which improves visibility and productivity by eliminating wasted time dealing with fragmented, siloed tools and processes. With AtTask, teams, managers and executives receive visibility into work planning, prioritization, resourcing and sequencing to help everyone work more efficiently toward achieving the organization’s goals. AtTask has a broad range of Global 500 and other enterprise customers, such as Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, and Trek. To learn more, visit www.AtTask.com or follow us on Twitter @AtTask.

Contact:

Shelbi Gomez
[email protected]
801-477-9813

Monetate, a leading technology solution that allows online marketers to leverage big data to create personalized online customer experiences, is pleased to have been included in the Forrester Research, Inc., February 2013 report, The Forrester Wave^TM : Online Testing Platforms, Q1 2013.

Customers gave Monetate “exceptionally high” satisfaction scores, and Monetate scored higher than all other vendors in the report in this category.

In addition to the customer satisfaction score, Monetate also scored highest for application usability and administration, and is one of two vendors being particularly noted for bringing “legitimate innovation” to online testing user interface design.

Wave author Joe Stanhope noted in the report that Monetate has seen a “meteoric rise” in the past two years.  Stanhope also states that Monetate provides “strong testing and targetingfunctionality in an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use package.”

“Monetate’s disruptive technology solutions are built for the online marketer, with testing being an integrated and critical component,” said David Brussin, CEO and founder at Monetate. “To see the highest possible satisfaction scores from our customers in the Forrester Wave is incredibly rewarding for us.  We experienced very strong growth in 2012, without compromising on our commitment to service, and we believe this report validates our customer-centric approach.”

About Monetate

Monetate empowers marketers to leverage Big Data to create more personalized and engaging online customer experiences. By providing more relevant web interactions, leading brands are able to anticipate and react to consumer preferences to generate stronger customer relationships and significantly increase profits.

Monetate drives billions of dollars of revenue every year for some of the best-known brands in the world, including Best Buy, Frontier Airlines, Aeropostale, The Sports Authority, and PETCO. The company’s comprehensive product suite and conversion expertise enable marketers to deliver a more relevant customer experience with unprecedented agility.

Leading marketers rely on Monetate’s cloud-based browser solutions to achieve a new level of speed and control, allowing them to run 16 times more optimization campaigns compared to industry averages. Monetate solutions include advanced products for testing, merchandising, targeting and cross-channel consistency, providing an opportunity to bypass IT restraints and react in real time to customer demands. Monetate also helps marketers implement best practices and drive online revenue through its expert strategic services and content publishing teams.