Balihoo (www.balihoo.com), the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs, announced today that the company has been ranked one of the world’s top private technology companies on the Red Herring Global 100.

“The Red Herring Global 100 focuses on innovation coupled with business success, and we’re honored to be included among this year’s list of impressive winners who are on the cutting edge of finding solutions to important business problems”

Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated award contenders on quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technological innovation, management strength, business strategy, customer acquisition, and market penetration. Selected from more than a thousand of the most cutting edge private technology companies in North America, Europe, and Asia, Balihoo was acknowledged for its growth potential and dramatic impact on the local marketing landscape. Previous winners of the award include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay.

“The Red Herring Global 100 focuses on innovation coupled with business success, and we’re honored to be included among this year’s list of impressive winners who are on the cutting edge of finding solutions to important business problems,” said Pete Gombert, Balihoo’s CEO. “For Balihoo, that means helping national brands close the local marketing gap so they can drive more revenue at the local level. Our clients are seeing tremendous ROI by automating the process of local marketing execution and our commitment to innovation and measurable results is the driving factor behind our continued success.”

For more information and valuable insights for taking national brand marketing campaigns to the local level, visit Balihoo’s Local Marketing Resource Center at http://balihoo.com/local-marketing-resources.

About Balihoo

Balihoo is the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs. By automating local marketing, Balihoo gives national brands unprecedented control over local marketing execution and the ability to control the customer experience closer to the point of purchase. Additional information about Balihoo is available at www.balihoo.com.

Contacts

OpenView Labs, the operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, today announced the completion of a significant competitive messaging project for one of the companies in its portfolio, Houston-based electronic health record (EHR) provider Prognosis Health Information Systems. Conducted over the course of one year, the project came about in response to government regulations mandating the implementation of EHR systems by 2014.

Fearing that its messaging — which was outdated due to changes to HIPAA laws enacted in 2011 — would no longer resonate with customers and prospects, Prognosis’s leadership team engaged OpenView Labs for help. “We recognized that if we didn’t change our messaging, we might never get the opportunity to perform,” explained Prognosis’s CEO, Ramsey Evans.

In response to this concern, OpenView led a two-phase project to help Prognosis react to changes in the HIPAA laws. Beginning in May 2011, OpenView identified the key pain points affecting Prognosis’s buyer personas, and produced a verified set of value propositions reflecting their changing needs and concerns. The second phase, conducted a year later, gave Prognosis the opportunity to re-test its new competitive messaging to ensure that it was still resonating with its top buyer personas given the changing regulatory environment.

An important aspect of every project that OpenView completes for its portfolio companies is ensuring a transfer of information and skills. “We want to impart relevant knowledge to our portfolio companies,” said OpenView Labs Managing Director Brian Zimmerman. “That’s why we’re focused on preparing companies like Prognosis to execute a repeatable process so that they can carry out projects like these on their own as they continue to scale. That self-sufficiency is critical to building a strong, sustainable business.”

Ultimately, the project allowed Prognosis to not only improve its messaging and Web content, but also its go-to-market strategy, marketing cost efficiency, customer service, and product development strategy.

“One of the most important things to emerge from this project is that the direction we’re now heading in and the messaging we’re using to communicate that direction is far different than what’s being conveyed by our competitors,” said Evans. “There’s a clear distinction that exists, and I think that’s a very good thing for our business.”

To find out more, see OpenView’s case study, “Sharpening the Spear: How One Company Leveraged Competitive Messaging to Formulate a Stronger Plan of Attack.” OpenView invested in Prognosis in 2010. It also published an eBook on competitive messaging earlier this year entitled “Why Us? A Guide to Competitive Messaging.”

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.

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.

Exinda, a global provider of next-generation WAN optimization and application performance assurance solutions, announced today that AMLI Residential, one of the preeminent multi-family housing companies in the United States, has chosen Exinda to assure the performance of its disaster recovery and backup systems between its Chicago and Atlanta locations.

AMLI relies on a MPLS network to connect its sites around the country, with the Chicago and Atlanta sites connecting with a 45 Mbps link. AMLI backs up two very large storage area networks as well as its database servers, internal applications, voice applications and more across the WAN to the Atlanta disaster recovery site, and also replicates its production data from all sites to Atlanta. When its MPLS connections started to become heavily congested causing production data replication to fall significantly behind, AMLI turned to Exinda.

“We consider data recovery and backup a critical part of our production environment, and we were falling more and more behind with our existing WAN Optimization solution,” said Billy Keller, vice president of IT infrastructure at AMLI. “Our replication was almost a year behind; we were in a heavy-risk situation. If something happened in Chicago, we’d have to rebuild from scratch and would lose a lot of data and a lot of money.”

With Exinda’s network optimization capabilities in place, AMLI quickly caught up on the replication of its production data, and just as importantly, does not need to invest in additional bandwidth to relieve congestion.

“This has been a great fit in ensuring our critical production environment can come back up on a second’s notice,” Keller said. “Exinda has allowed me to sleep better at night knowing that if something does happen, we are prepared.”

“AMLI was able to see significant improvement in their disaster recovery and replication backups with Exinda’s WAN optimization 2.0 solutions,” said Brendan Reid, vice president of product marketing for Exinda. “They are a great example of how Exinda is working with enterprises to help them assure the performance of the applications that are most strategic to their business.”

About Exinda

Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Internet traffic control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Internet Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 2,500 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

About AMLI

Headquartered in Chicago, AMLI is one of the preeminent multifamily companies in the nation. The company is focused on the development, acquisition and management of luxury apartment communities. AMLI is committed to customer service and providing our residents a worry-free, high-value living experience in our communities. AMLI® is a brand name representing high quality, exceptional service and superior value.

Intronis, Inc.today announced the immediate availability of its Fall Release ’12, the latest version of its best-in-class cloud backup and recovery solution for the IT channel.

Now interoperable with VMware vSphere®, the Fall Release ’12 enables Intronis partners to make full system-image backups within their robust backup and recovery solution, lowering their Manhours per Gigabyte™. The new functionality also allows Intronis partners to streamline backups of multiple VMware virtual machines across several servers to the cloud, a local vault or both. All backups are fully encrypted and restoration of customer data is completed from the cloud through the centralized Intronis Partner Portal.

Leveraging the VMware vSphere® Web Services API, the Intronis solution now offers deduplication at the device level for speedier backups and features easy-to-use wizards already available to Intronis partners for other data backups including files/folders, Microsoft Exchange Information Store, Exchange mailbox, SQL, and System State. Other major, time-saving enhancements include improving the overall operational efficiencies of the Intronis Partner Portal such as advancements to the backup status dashboard, file scanning and more.

“Our Fall Release continues to support Intronis’ value proposition of making it easier, more reliable and less time intensive for our MSP partners to manage their Intronis backup solution,” said Carol Ferrari, vice president of marketing and community for Intronis. “Having the ability to support VMware vSphere® environments via system image-based backups, along with all other backup types, and store them to the cloud or a local device from one centralized web-based portal is a functionality our partners have been asking for, and we’re pleased to deliver. Our Fall Release will help Intronis partners streamline the day-to-day management of their back up business, reducing their Manhours Per Gigabyte, improving profit margins, and expanding their cloud-based managed service capabilities.”

“Backup and recovery is an essential solution within our managed IT services portfolio that helps us to deliver notable business value and greater peace of mind to our customers,” says Intronis partner MJ Shoer, president and virtual chief technology officer, Jenaly Technology Group, Inc. “The addition of VMware vSphere® support in Intronis’ new Fall Release is a big win for channel partners and certainly makes it easier and more efficient for us to remotely manage backups for both virtual and blended IT infrastructures. The ease of use and reliability within the new release is second to none, which is why we’ve standardized on Intronis for all our customers’ backup and recovery needs.”

For more information on the Fall Release, check out the What’s New page at Intronis.com and see its new listing on the VMware Solution Exchange.
MSPs and IT professionals may start a free, no obligation trial of Intronis’ cloud backup and recovery solution by visiting www.intronis.com/freetrial. Intronis’ mobile applications may be downloaded from iTunes or Android Market.

To learn, see and hear more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery is a world-class cloud backup solution for the IT channel. Intronis provides the industry’s easiest to use secure data solution for offsite and local backup, which generates a monthly recurring revenue stream to add to your business. Intronis offers the best, deepest Exchange, SQL backup on the market, supports virtualized environments with native VMware backup and is integrated to major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. Partners receive expert, customer support from our U.S.-based team. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs, and the company has been named Best Revenue Generator seven times and Best Customer Support three times by members of ASCII. www.intronis.com.

uSamp, a leader in providing targeted audiences for global consumer and business insights, has been named one of the fastest growing private companies in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal. uSamp, founded in 2008, ranks ninth among all Los Angeles County businesses on the Los Angeles Business Journal’s overall 2012 list.

The Los Angeles Business Journal compiled an annual list of the 100 fastest growing private companies in greater Los Angeles, reviewed more than 1,000 submissions before establishing its annual top 100. CEOs and top executives from companies on the list were saluted Nov. 12 at an event held at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills.

This is the first year the Los Angeles Business Journal has recognized uSamp as one of the county’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.

Over the past two years, uSamp has experienced a growth rate of 312 percent. In just five years, uSamp has grown from a company of three employees to having a worldwide presence with over 200 employees. The company attributes its growth to its team and clients who have worked to make uSamp a stronger and wiser technology company.

“Being named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list is a testament to the hard work and dedication that everyone at uSamp has showcased over the past five years,” said uSamp President Gregg Lavin. “We are happy to be named to this list and plan to continue to work hard and expand the company both domestically and abroad.”

For the complete list, including uSamp, go to: http://www.cbjonline.com/a2labj/lists/2012-Fastest-Growing-Private-Cos-1-100.pdf.

About uSamp

uSamp (www.uSamp.com), the fastest growing company in the Market Research Industry, is a premier provider of technology and survey respondents used to obtain consumer and business insights.

uSamp’s leading-mobile technology and SaaS platform transform the way companies gain intelligence to make better, faster decisions about their products and services by tapping into uSamp’s 9 million member global panel of survey respondents. Through uSamp’s proprietary technologies for self-serve sampling and survey authoring, companies have on-demand access to millions of profiled survey respondents.

uSamp is based in Los Angeles, with five offices throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 200 team members worldwide. uSamp was No. 213 on the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies and ranked No. 11 in the 2011 Forbes America’s Most Promising Company List.

After only a year with a direct presence in the southern African market, Exinda Networks has experienced explosive growth built on the roll-out of a robust partner programme attracting the top IT and networking integrators in the country, and a market that has enthusiastically embraced the company’s next-generation WAN optimisation technology.

While first-generation WAN optimisation products focus on accelerating data over the wide area network (WAN), next-generation technology focuses on understanding the business’s network, its applications and optimising the user experience.

Exinda’s clients include government departments, financial service companies such as Hyphen Technology, and The Illovo Sugar Group, Africa’s largest sugar producer.

“A channel-focused organisation such as Exinda cannot meet the needs of our end-user base alone,” says Brandon Rochat, territory sales manager, South Africa, Exinda Networks. “We therefore understand the need for partners who are not only technically competent, but are also highly respected in the market for their skills and customer service.
“By tailoring our channel programme to meet the needs of our partners and the end-user, we have developed a collaborative environment designed to ensure all parties involved win. This, combined with the stellar growth of Exinda in Africa, has resulted in the company gaining the who’s who of value-added resellers (VARs) in South Africa, with more knocking on our door all the time.”

Rochat explains that Exinda’s partner programme is designed to ensure its product is effectively represented throughout the region by resellers who understand their customer’s business and network requirements. They must also possess the appropriate skills and experience to best serve and support customers. For its part, Exinda selects the cream of the channel crop in a limited capacity to make sure its partners’ margins are protected, they are well supported by Exinda, and customers are optimally served.

Exinda currently has two partner levels in South Africa – Platinum and Gold. Platinum Partner status is only available to VARs that have demonstrated their commitment and success as an Exinda Gold Partner. The Exinda Platinum status delivers all the benefits Gold Partners receive, plus an increase in margins, sales, marketing, technical assistance and joint business planning.

Exinda’s South African Platinum Partners include:

* Gijima
* Bytes System Integration
* Layer 7 Networks

Gold Partner status is designed for partners that specialise in multiple disciplines and verticals. Exinda will work with its Gold Partners to assist them in their marketing, sales and implementation efforts. Gold Partners are eligible for marketing funds, deal registration, qualified sales leads and self-paced training that, when successfully completed, results in Exinda sales and technical accreditation.

Exinda’s Gold Partners in South Africa to date include:

* Datacentrix KwaZulu-Natal
* First Technology
* Majestic Data
* BDNS
* Speccom
* Thembanet

To ensure the mutual success of Exinda and its partners, the company has dedicated resources and tools to assist its channel in delivering the best customer service profitably. This includes the MyExinda partner portal, and numerous lead generation activities.

Recently, Inc. Magazine named Exinda to its sixth annual Inc. 500|5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the United States of America’s fastest-growing private companies. Exinda ranked in the top quartile of all software companies, and was the only WAN optimisation vendor named to the list.

Exinda

Exinda is a proven global supplier of next-generation WAN optimisation and application assurance solutions. The company has helped more than 2 500 organisations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

Editorial contacts

Exinda
Brandon Rochat
Territory Sales Manager, South and sub-Saharan Africa
(+27) 011 655 7390
[email protected]

When Cantey Technology, a South Carolina-based managed services provider (MSP) and technology consultancy, works with its SMB customers, it strives to deliver a three-prong insurance policy when it comes to backup and disaster recovery (BDR).

By layering file imaging and off-site local backup with Intronis’ online backup solutions, Cantey Technology has each of its clients well prepared for the unexpected and ready to recover their data within hours.

“We do a BDR assessment with every client, and we ask them straight out how much data loss they can handle. We’ve never once had a customer say they can tolerate any loss, so then we go right on to talk about backup,” explains Derek Iannelli-Smith, consultant and service desk manager for Cantey Technology.

The solution provider’s three-prong approach turned out to be lifesaver for one customer when a corrupt file nearly brought their HVAC business to a grinding halt.

The customer relied heavily on its customer relationship management (CRM) tool, which was built off an Access database that Cantey Technology backs up with Intronis every evening. Luckily, when the database image recently went haywire, Cantey Technology leveraged Intronis to quickly deliver the most updated version of the data back to its customer. In fact, it took Iannelli-Smith only about 10 minutes to restore the data – using his smart phone while he was pulled over in a parking lot.

“The ability to identify the correct data, restore it in a matter of minutes and get our client the most current data file for their business was a great save for us, and even better for our client,” he says. While the other BDR solutions in place would have supported the data restore, having the capability literally at his fingertips to access that data yielded a much quicker response and recovery. “We try to achieve a two- to four-hour recovery window, and Intronis plays a significant role in achieving that,” says Iannelli-Smith.

“By providing us with a reliable, valuable value-add solution for our customers, Intronis has enhanced our reputation in the business community and that has helped us add recurring revenue, increasing our revenues as well as the size of our customer base. It is an essential add-on for all our managed services contracts, across all of our customer demographics,” says Iannelli-Smith.

Intronis, the world’s leading cloud backup and recovery solution for the IT channel, solicits success stories from its partners as part of its Intronis Hero Award program. Intronis selects and features one story each month to serve as an example of how its partners can be heroes to their clients.

To learn, see and hear more about Intronis online, follow the channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery innovator on Facebook and Twitter.

About Intronis

Intronis Cloud Backup and Recovery is a world-class cloud backup solution for the IT channel. Intronis provides the industry’s easiest to use secure data solution for offsite and local backup, which generates a monthly recurring revenue stream to add to your business. Intronis offers the best, deepest Exchange, SQL backup on the market, supports virtualized environments with native VMware backup and is integrated to major solutions in the MSP ecosystem. Partners receive expert, customer support from our U.S.-based team. The solution has been field tested by thousands of MSPs, and the company has been named Best Revenue Generator seven times and Best Customer Support four times by members of ASCII.