Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that it has received the Virtualization Product Of The Year award for its next generation backup and data protection product, Acronis Backup & Recovery® Virtual Edition, from the Green I.T. Magazine awards in the United Kingdom.

In recognition of Earth Day (April 22), the awards honor products, services and projects that contribute to and promote a more environmentally aware approach to IT practices today. Supported by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change and iomart hosting®, the Green I.T. awards include categories for Recycling Project of the Year, Sustainable Design Product of the Year and IT Operator of the Year, amongst others.

“The adoption of virtualization can bring benefits to businesses of all sizes,” commented David Blackman, general manager, North Europe, Middle East and Africa at Acronis. “The fiscal savings from fewer physical servers, using less power and taking up less physical room has direct environmental benefits as well — less energy consumed, fewer resources used and therefore less impact on the environment. We are proud to have been recognized as a leader in this growing market.”

Acronis Backup & Recovery® can help businesses to accelerate their adoption of virtualization by providing integrated data migration tools with innovative, fast backup and recovery technology. Acronis supports all major hypervisors including Microsoft® Hyper-V, VMware vSphere®, Citrix® Xen®, Red Hat® Enterprise Virtualization and Parallels®. Critical data can be quickly recovered from and migrated between a virtual, physical and cloud environments from one easy to use solution.

The winners of the Green I.T. Awards 2012 are highlighted at www.greenitawards.com. Green I.T. is published by Barrow & Thompkins Connexion Ltd in the UK, whose publications also include Storage Magazine, Network Computing and Computing Security.

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages.

For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis

Acronis^®, Acronis Backup & Recovery ® and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Acronis Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget (NYSE:ET) unveiled its CONNECT Global Tour today, giving interactive marketers across four continents a chance to learn from award-winning authors, thought leaders, industry analysts, and company executives.

Set for Sydney, São Paulo, Toronto and London, the CONNECT Global Tour is expected to collectively attract more than 1,500 marketers, offering practical advice and inspiration to build better interactive marketing across email, mobile, Facebook, Twitter and the Web.

“Marketers around the globe are all looking to solve a similar challenge – how to better connect with consumers to build loyalty and lifetime customer value,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “Our CONNECT Global Tour will provide the information, inspiration and pragmatic advice marketers need to create engaging interactive marketing.”

CONNECT Global Tour events include:

• Sydney (May 16, Intercontinental Sydney): Joseph Jaffe, founder of Evol8tion, LLC and author of Flip the Funnel, will keynote the first stop. Jaffe will provide insight on how brands can enter the competitive market by capitalizing on existing clients. The event will also offer a Digital Strategy Workshop featuring sessions on cross-channel marketing, email design, behavioral remarketing and social media marketing on Twitter and Facebook.

• São Paulo (June 13, Grand Hyatt São Paulo): Shar VanBoskirk, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., will keynote the South America event. As one of the foremost authorities on interactive marketing, VanBoskirk will share her unique expert advice on how brands can use interactive marketing to boost sales and develop customer relationships.

• Toronto (June 28, Hyatt Regency Toronto): Rob Brosnan, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc., will keynote the Canadian tour. Brosnan, a veteran interactive marketer, will offer new insights and advice on how marketers can integrate interactive channels into their marketing mix to create data-driven cross-channel marketing across email, mobile, social media and the web.

• London (Nov. 7, London Hilton on Park Lane): The European event will feature keynotes from ExactTarget executives and industry thought leaders and will offer industry-specific breakout sessions.

To register for any of the stops on the ExactTarget CONNECT Global Tour, click here.

The announcement of the CONNECT Global Tour follows Forrester Research naming ExactTarget a “consistent leader” in email marketing in “The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Vendors, Q1 2012” report. The report awarded ExactTarget’s current product offering perfect scores for its usability, triggered messaging capabilities, dynamic content, and ability to automate multichannel analytics. To download The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Vendors, Q1 2012 report, visit www.ExactTarget.com/EmailWave.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of email marketing and cross-channel interactive marketing software-as-a-service solutions that empower organizations of all sizes to communicate with their customers through email, mobile, social media and websites. ExactTarget’s powerful suite of integrated applications enable marketers to plan, automate, deliver and optimize data-driven interactive marketing and real-time communications to drive customer engagement, increase sales and improve return on marketing investment. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana with offices across North America and in Europe, South America and Australia, ExactTarget trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ET.” For more information, visit www.ExactTarget.com.

Contacts

Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced a new secure remote access experience called SmartClient, which offers users a fast, easy, and secure way to connect and interact with computing environments in Skytap Cloud.

SmartClient offers the flexibility to access Skytap Cloud virtual machines using a new browser app, or a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-capable client, on any device including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. SmartClient brings to market innovation that spans both the unique software layer that powers Skytap Cloud and the remote access clients used by Skytap customers. These new capabilities make it easy for users to access any Skytap Cloud supported guest host — including Windows, Linux, or virtual appliances — just like they were sitting in front of a physical machine.

“As cloud computing becomes broadly adopted by enterprises, smartphone and media tablet users within these firms will also want access to these services in a familiar and on-demand manner,” said Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner, Inc. “This is part of a continuing trend of the consumerization of IT — a trend that cloud service providers will need to keep in synch with that balances the needs of an increasingly mobile society while minimizing the risk to enterprises.”

SmartClient delivers a modern visual design that simplifies user interaction when working with a large number of virtual machines (VMs). This includes a new toolbar with common actions such as toggling to full-screen mode, run/suspend VM, and one-click credential details. Users can easily switch between multiple VMs without having to leave full-screen mode. They can also utilize a new multi-VM view to manage any number of VMs, complete with navigation options to quickly pinpoint the specific VM they wish to access.

Whether using the SmartClient browser app or their favorite RDP client, Skytap customers will benefit from the full visibility and control features Skytap Cloud delivers. This includes virtual machine auto-suspend after periods of inactivity, enhanced collaboration with an “over-the-shoulder” view, and the ability to assign granular user access permissions. Additionally, customers can access any Skytap Cloud virtual machine without having to expose network ports to the Internet.

“SmartClient gives us increased flexibility and performance when working with the virtualized environments we’ve created in Skytap Cloud,” said Keith Weisel, manager of application development at Dendreon Corporation. “This translates into a real advantage and increased capability for our staff to develop the applications we need to support business critical processes at Dendreon.”

Skytap also announced the availability of new features that enhance visibility and control of cloud deployments:

• Customizable Resource Utilization Reporting: Skytap Cloud allows users to create customized reports with a range of options to audit groups or individuals, over a specified period of time. These reports can then be exported for further analysis, or imported directly into an existing reporting and billing system. With these new capabilities, customers can quickly and easily review their cloud computing utilization, and more accurately forecast their future usage. When combined with existing quota management, advanced notifications, and virtual machine auto-suspend features, these capabilities offer businesses all the benefits of cloud computing with the IT controls commonly utilized on premises.
• Configurable Virtual Machine Bursting Limits: Administrators can now set a maximum ceiling of resource usage over the customer’s existing subscription level. This flexible limit provides customers with additional burst computing capacity to accommodate any temporary spikes in usage. Skytap Cloud notifications can send real-time alerts when normal subscription limits have been exceeded so the customer is aware that they have exceeded their existing subscription capacity.

“With these new features, we’re giving our customers an improved user experience, enhanced collaboration capabilities, and deeper insight into how efficiently they are using their cloud computing resources,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap. “These innovations are another key building block in Skytap’s efforts to provide customers with highly intuitive cloud computing solutions.”

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.

Skytap, a cloud service provider that claims to have more than a million hosted VMs in its cloud, today announced three new improvements to its service that will ease testing and operating collections of new virtual machines (VMs).

The three features include better remote access, customizable usage reports and a new burstable rate for heavy traffic conditions.

Let’s examine each one.

First is the ability to gain a better remote access connection. When you initially set up your VM, one of the issues you may encounter is how to connect to it to run the VM instance. (I wrote a piece for Tom’s Hardware awhile back about how to do this with Verizon’s cloud services. In the past you had to use command lines through a secure shell or some other means to get enough of the operating system installed to be able to remote into it.

Skytap lets you skip this step with its Smart Client. This provides a Java-based browser app that speaks Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to the Skytap cloud service, and then interprets this protocol to the individual VM. You don’t need to open up an RDP port on each VM, and you don’t need to load an RDP client on your desktop. In fact, you can use just about any popular browser (IE 7/8/9, Firefox or Safari) and run on any desktop (Windows, Mac and Linux, and even via iPads). With a single click, you can be inside your VM. There is even a nice toolbar at the top of the screen where you can switch between running VMs.

Many cloud providers offer something similar, but don’t have the fidelity of an RDP session, or else require an open RDP port on the individual VMs to work. With Skytap, if you mess up your networking configuration, you can still access the machine through the Smart Client. Indeed, you can actually see the BIOS boot process when you power on the VM initially, which can further help with diagnosing problems. It is a real boon for the dev/test environment, where you might be monkeying around with various machine configurations. It is as if you are actually sitting in front of your computer, giving you full visibility and control over your VM. You can also view all of your VMs in a simple list, as shown below:

In addition to Smart Client, Skytap is also making its reporting more powerful so you can track your VM usage by groups, users or specific time periods. You can also export the results to a CSV file for further analysis and to help you better forecast your future cloud usage.

There is no additional charge for either of these services, both of which are now available.

Finally, Skytap has added the ability to configure a burstable limit above your existing bandwidth subscription and particular resource allocation. This temporarily enables additional capacity, without the need to change your current subscription plan. It’s easy to see how this could come in handy.