OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support, announced today the release of a beta version of its customer service operations assessment tool.

Designed to help expansion-stage technology companies evaluate and improve their customer service efforts, the tool can be accessed online at on the OpenView Labs site by clicking here.

To take advantage of this free assessment tool, users simply need to answer a short series of questions about their company, its operations, and its service and culture, among other related areas. The output is a personalized customer service score as well as concrete recommendations on how to improve. Each recommendation is supplemented with links to industry-leading related content in the form of articles, books, and videos that help users further their understanding and implement it.

“In a highly competitive landscape, expansion-stage technology companies need to find various ways to differentiate themselves, and customer service is among the most important,” said Brian Zimmerman, Managing Director of OpenView Labs, the firm’s strategic consulting arm that built the assessment tool. “We believe that professionals who invest the few minutes it takes to complete the assessment will get some really valuable insights into how they can improve their company’s customer service.”

To create the tool, the firm partnered with Bill Price, one of its senior advisors and a former customer service executive at Amazon, as well as his team at Driva Solutions. It includes an online form for providing feedback that will be used to refine future iterations of the tool, and user feedback is strongly encouraged.

This is the first in a series of online assessments that OpenView will be creating. Future assessment will focus on content marketing, social media, outbound lead generation, and recruiting, among other functional areas.

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.

Today’s enterprise work environment is more complex than ever before. Work is often impacted by a myriad of siloed tools, disengagement, confusion and a lack of visibility into value and resources.

Traditional project management tools are no longer enough to meet these challenges, as they only focus on projects, not the full work lifecycle. AtTask is changing all of this with a single solution that helps teams manage the full lifecycle of work by utilizing the industry’s only cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution.

“The enterprise application market has matured over the past several years, and we’ve seen that traditional project management tools are failing,” said Eric Morgan, AtTask CEO. “Our clients are no longer just managing projects — they are managing and controlling the chaos of all types of enterprise work. Enterprise teams need a single, central place that improves visibility and productivity by eliminating the wasted time caused by disconnected tools and processes. Our Enterprise Work Management solution provides that single system of truth for our customers.”

AtTask revolutionized project management more than two years ago with the introduction of social project management and a focus on team member adoption through its uniqueTeamHome solution. Customers reported a 400 percent increase in team member adoption and a 500 percent increase in project manager adoption, which delivered exceptional visibility and productivity. Enterprise Work Management is the next stage in solving the complexities faced by enterprise teams.

Hundreds of companies, including Fortune 500 brands such as Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, BASF, Trek and Schneider Electric, have managed their work with AtTask. Schneider Electric has leveraged AtTask to manage its global work across several departments since 2009. During that time, the company has increased its workflow through streamlined processes, better capacity planning and faster reporting.

“With AtTask, we’re able to get full work visibility and insight in real-time to help bring clarity to the organization, which helps us build trust with our peers,” said Bill Maxwell , Schneider Electric’s director of Communication Systems. “AtTask has become our system of truth.”

AtTask is the only work management solution in the market that meets the unique needs of the enterprise: Managing repeatable, structured and frequent interdependent work that requires significant team collaboration. AtTask’s Enterprise Work Management solution is a single solution that provides:

• End-to-end work lifecycle management
  One system manages the entire lifecycle of all types of work, from initial request, prioritization and planning through coordination, delivery and measurement.
• Unified collaboration
  One system combines the power of social within the context of all work, from projects, tasks and documents to approvals and work processes.
• Work automation
  One system streamlines repeatable work processes using custom-built templates and process improvement to increase productivity and efficiency.
• Expert guidance
  AtTask offers experienced work management and software implementation experts that use industry best practices to help customize and guide teams through implementation to ongoing adoption, visibility and success.

“Enterprise Work Management provides visibility for senior managers, managers and enterprise workers that they can trust, use and understand,” Morgan said. “Visibility is critical for every role involved as they justify and forecast their resources, align work with strategy, and improve productivity. The key is to put a tool in the hands of the team members that they will actually use. Once they engage, the ability to gain visibility increases dramatically.”

To learn more about Enterprise Work Management, visit www.attask.com/enterprise-work-management.

Additional Resources:

• Listen to AtTask CEO Eric Morgan talk about Enterprise Work Management: http://www.attask.com/ewm-vision.
• Read more about customers successfully using Enterprise Work Management: www.attask.com/customers.

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

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today unveiled a new Automation Pack that seamlessly enables on-premise Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Visual Studio and Testing Manager workflows to dynamically create testing environments in Skytap Cloud.

The Automation Pack offers flexible support for a wide range of application development workloads, ranging from .NET client applications to complex n-tier server applications, such as SharePoint. With these capabilities, customers using TFS and Visual Studio 2012 can accelerate build-deploy-test (BDT) workflows, increase business agility, and lower costs using Skytap Cloud.

Agile development and testing methodologies enable businesses to accelerate the delivery of new software products to market. While some cloud services have attempted to provide a foundation for these agile environments, they often require sacrifices from the development and test teams. Many cloud providers operate at the basic infrastructure-as-a-service level, which typically require an up-front time and resource investment to create the target cloud environments in advance. The Skytap Automation Pack brings together the best of both worlds, providing the automated scale and elasticity of cloud infrastructure coupled with the preferred tools and processes that development and test teams are currently using today.

“Agile development for the cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a report titled “Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016.” “The trend is compelling enough to force traditional agile development vendors to ‘cloud enable’ their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud.”

The Skytap Automation Pack is software that installs on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, providing workflow automation and seamless integration with Skytap Cloud. With this solution, customers can:

• Run TFS on-premise and automatically spin-up, run, and tear down complex Microsoft development and testing environments in Skytap Cloud on-demand
• Dynamically provision secure VPN network connectivity between test environments in Skytap Cloud and TFS without manual intervention
• Create golden templates of complete test environments in Skytap Cloud using Microsoft Test Manager — automating the creation of identical clean environments for each test pass
• Automatically snapshot entire test environments in Skytap Cloud to investigate and diagnose root cause of test pass failures
• Review consolidated test pass reports using Microsoft Test Manager
• Support complex testing requirements of n-tier applications with virtual test environments that are identical to production environments on-premise or in Microsoft Azure

“Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 is an Enterprise ALM solution that enables teams to deliver software at a continuous cadence with agility and quality. The lab management capability of the solution delivers self-service experiences for developers and testers that reduce the cycle times in provisioning and managing development and test environments with operational compliance,” said Karthik Ravindran, senior director of ALM product management at Microsoft. “With the Skytap Automation Pack, teams can extend their Team Foundation Server ALM lab infrastructure beyond their on-premise investments, to include the option of the Skytap cloud infrastructure. This option will enable teams to burst to the Skytap cloud from within their ALM workflows for dev and test lab management and gain the economics of scale benefits of cloud computing for dev and test workloads.”

By deploying TFS and Visual Studio workloads in Skytap Cloud, businesses can eliminate the time and effort required to provision, configure, and manage complex on-premise test environments. Customers benefit from Skytap’s Intelligent Automation Platform, which offers self-service automation, team collaboration, and visibility and control capabilities not available with traditional cloud environments. For example, distributed teams of developers and testers can create and collaborate on highly parallelized testing environments. With on-demand access to Skytap Cloud, customers can scale up and quickly deploy additional environments as needed to accelerate software development and testing cycles. Users can also leverage other existing development and test tools in a hybrid cloud environment by creating secure VPN connections from on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud.

“In order to be a truly Agile development process, the entire application lifecycle must be fast, including the provisioning of test environments and the speed at which you can deploy your application into these environments,” said Sumit Mehrotra, director of product management at Skytap. “By combining their on-premise TFS or Visual Studio environments with Skytap Cloud, Agile teams can deliver products faster, increasing the speed at which the organization can generate revenue.”

Skytap’s director of product management, Sumit Mehrotra, will be speaking at the Microsoft ALM 3 Summit as part of a panel on Agile testing, helping software development teams adopt the best practices that fit their organizations. As part of the presentation, Sumit will provide a live demonstration of the new Skytap Automation Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The presentation will take place on Thurs., Jan. 31 at 12:45 p.m. PT in the Cascade room of Microsoft Conference Center, Building 33 on Microsoft’s Redmond campus.

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. To try Skytap Cloud and learn more, visit www.skytap.com.

Contact:

Lindsey Bradshaw
Barokas Public Relations
Email Contact
206-264-8220

AtTask (www.attask.com), an industry leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Enterprise Work Management solutions, continues to outpace the competition and today announced another year of record revenue growth.

Year-over-year revenue growth was 38 percent and was fueled by strong expansion and increased renewals from its client base.

The market opportunity before AtTask is significant. According to Gartner Inc.‘s Software as a Service, All Regions, 2010-2015, 1H12 Update forecast, enterprise SaaS was predicted to reach $14.5 billion in revenue for 2012 and is predicted to grow to an astounding $22.1 billion by 2015. With the continued trend in the market toward department-based spending on SaaS enterprise software and the desire for greater work visibility, AtTask is uniquely positioned for continued growth and exceptional results.

“Growth and retention in our customer base shows the reliance and value our solution is delivering. The improved work visibility AtTask provides is leading to better productivity and results for our customers,” said Eric Morgan, CEO of AtTask. “Our executive team and board are in place, we’ve strengthened the balance sheet with our Series C raise, and we are aggressively accelerating our leadership position in the Enterprise Work Management space.”

The company’s exceptional results in 2012 validate the company’s overall strategy:

• AtTask has grown its client base with the addition of impressive brands from the Global 2000 and Fortune 500. The company’s international client base has grown to 275 clients using AtTask Enterprise Work Management solutions in 65 countries.
• Expansion sales from existing customers grew 62 percent year over year.
• AtTask now has 38 clients each paying more than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.
• The AtTask Marketing Solutions Group, which formally launched in September 2012, has exceeded expectations by adding more than 20 net new Enterprise Marketing teams. This strong start demonstrates the value that AtTask provides marketing teams and the need for the company’s solution.
• In order to execute on the company’s strategy, AtTask plans to increase the employee count to 325 in early 2013.

AtTask’s market position and strategy has been validated by industry experts. In 2012, AtTask was recognized as a “Leader” in the Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Services report, and as a “Champion” by Info-Tech Research Group‘s Mid-Market PPM Vendor Landscape report. AtTask also announced in October that they had closed on a growth round of capital, raising a total of $17 million. Baltimore-based Greenspring Associates led this round.

“Organizations across every industry are looking for ways to improve how they manage the end-to-end work cycle, and for a product that solves the ongoing challenge of visibility and understanding enterprise workers’ day-to-day work,” Morgan stated. “This opens up an enormous opportunity for AtTask across the market, particularly with our proven track record of meeting our customers’ needs.”

To learn more about AtTask, visit www.attask.com.

About AtTask

AtTask is the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) leader for Enterprise Work Management solutions. AtTask provides the work visibility and accountability that enterprise departments lack by enabling knowledge workers to better receive, plan, prioritize, and coordinate their work through projects and collaborative work processes.  AtTask provides an easy-to-use solution that improves productivity, social collaboration, recognition, and results. AtTask has a broad range of customers including Global 2000 brands such as Nike, Cisco, ABC, ESPN, 3M, and Trek. Additionally, AtTask was recently recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Inc. 2012 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Services.

Contact:

Shelbi Gomez
[email protected]
801-477-9813

Kareo, Inc., the cloud-based medical office software provider for small medical practices, announced today the closing of a new $20.5 million equity investment led by Stripes Group with participation from existing Kareo investor Western Technology Investments.

This new funding is in addition to the $18 million previously raised, bringing Kareo’s total funding to more than $38 million. Kareo will use the new capital to launch Kareo Billing Services, a technology-enabled revenue cycle management solution for small medical practices, and is extending its market reach and leadership position through new investment in sales and marketing.

“This latest investment is another key milestone for Kareo and our efforts to deliver intuitive and affordable medical office software and services to our small practice customers. We welcome Stripes Group to Kareo’s investor base and Ken Fox , managing partner of Stripes Group, to Kareo’s Board of Directors,” said Dan Rodrigues , founder and CEO of Kareo. “We are looking forward to working with Stripes Group alongside our existing investors as we pursue the next exciting phase of Kareo’s growth.”

Kareo’s latest fundraising marks the close of a record-breaking 2012 for the company, during which time Kareo doubled revenue and its employee base while surpassing 6,000 customers representing over 16,000 providers.

“Stripes Group was attracted by Kareo’s unparalleled track record at building and deploying cloud-based software into the small practice medical market. The company’s growth rate over the last few years has been phenomenal and is a testament to the strength of Kareo’s ability to execute in an area where many have failed,” said Fox. “We have considerable confidence in Dan and his team and are proud to be part of an amazing company and its ongoing efforts to help small practices thrive and prosper.”

Small medical practices are known for creating intimate, long-standing patient relationships that focus on a continuum of care. Kareo enables physicians and administrative staff to streamline office management by simplifying billing, scheduling and recordkeeping. By easing the administrative burden faced by small practices, Kareo enables physicians and their staff to increase their focus on patient care.

Kareo Billing Services

Responding to market demands for improved billing services for small medical practices, the company has launched Kareo Billing Services. Kareo’s convenient front-office tools are now combined with a dedicated team of medical billing experts whose sole purpose is to help medical offices get paid for the important services they provide. Unlike traditional approaches, Kareo’s model brings the ultimate flexibility, giving physicians the options to choose a full-service plan, software only plans, or migrate between the plans as the needs of the practice change.

“With all the pressures of running a medical practice today, our customers need companies who will adapt with them,” said Rodrigues. “When practices have staff and expertise to do their own billing, then our software is perfect for them.  When they face challenges and need our billing help, then our people are ready to step in.”

To ensure a seamless transition to Kareo Billing Services, Kareo has developed a Customer Success Program through which it works closely with customers to learn existing processes while establishing a plan to optimize these processes by leveraging Kareo’s cloud-based software and billing services team. Practice optimization can take the form of electronic claim form submission enrollment, establishing standard fee schedules, logging payer specific contract rates, setting up appointment schedules, and mapping workflows from any integrated electronic health record applications.

Following the rollout of Kareo’s Billing Services solution, small practices often experience significant improvements in billing collection rates and timing as well as the benefits derived from eliminating the complexity and hassles of directly managing the billing process with insurance companies and patients. This is another way Kareo helps small practices reduce administrative burdens while shifting focus to their core mission of patient care.

Kareo Medical Billing Partner Program

Kareo also announced the creation of the Kareo Medical Billing Partner Program. This new program is targeted at the more than 600 billing companies that use Kareo’s Practice Management software today; one of the largest established billing company networks in the U.S. Medical billing companies can take advantage of new Kareo benefits and support designed to help them grow their businesses and deepen their relationships with their customers.

By offering Kareo Billing Services and the extensive choices available through Kareo’s Medical Billing Partner Program network, small practices will have multiple ways to address their unique needs – such as specialty expertise, advisory services, and local presence.

Both the Kareo Billing Services and the Kareo Medical Billing Partner Program are currently available in the U.S. For more information please visit www.kareo.com.

About Kareo

Kareo is the only medical office software and services provider dedicated to serving the small practice. Kareo believes that, with the right tools and support, small practices can do big things. Over 16,000 medical professionals count on Kareo to manage their offices intuitively and affordably. Quick to set up and simple to use, Kareo’s cloud-based software helps doctors get paid faster, keep cash flowing, and see the financial big picture through medical billing and practice management tools. Founded in 2004, Kareo’s mission is to free doctors’ hands for important work of patient care. For more information on Kareo, visit www.kareo.com.

About Stripes Group

Stripes Group is an entrepreneurial growth equity firm that makes $10 million to $100 million minority and majority investments in Internet, SaaS, Healthcare IT and branded consumer products businesses. Stripes was founded by entrepreneurs to be a resource for successful entrepreneurs. We invest in rapidly growing businesses that are market share leaders with proven business models and annual revenues in excess of $15 million. Visit www.stripesgroup.com to learn more.

Media Contact:

Jody Lomenzo
Feinstein Kean Healthcare | an Ogilvy Company
P 617 761 6733
[email protected]

VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools, today launched a comprehensive suite of agile visualizations in its Winter 2013 product release focused on enabling teams to more easily identify problems and collaborate.

“Visualization is becoming increasingly important in better understanding complex relationships.  In the context of agile software development, our suite of visualizations can really help teams understand rapidly changing relationships and dependencies occurring during the software development lifecycle.  With our Winter 2013 release, we’ve taken the next major step in simplifying project collaboration and making sure everyone on the team understands the impact their work is having on the overall program goals,” said Robert Holler , president and CEO of VersionOne. “This makes it much easier for teams to achieve their goals in a more holistic manner.”

VersionOne’s new visualizations help users identify impediments in their agile processes. They make it easier for users to understand and manage complex work item relationships and dependencies. Project dependency diagrams help team members see schedule anomalies, helping them to sequence work within a release. Additional improvements for Enterprise Edition include enhanced cross-project visibility for epics and streamlined epic breakdown, simplifying agile portfolio and program management.

For more information about the Winter 2013 product release, visit here.

About VersionOne

VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools. By simplifying the planning and tracking of agile projects, we help teams deliver better software faster. Since 2002, companies such as Boeing, Cerner, Fiserv, GMAC, Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Motorola, Novell, Oracle, Qualcomm, SAP and Siemens have turned to VersionOne. Today tens of thousands of teams around the world use VersionOne. For daily VersionOne and agile development news follow us on Google+, Twitter, Facebook and ourblogs. Agile Made Easier @ VersionOne.com.