Category Archives: Partnerships

Human Resources, Northgate Information Solutions, Partnerships, Payroll, SuccessFactors

SuccessFactors, NorthgateArinso Partner for Integrated Cloud HCM, Payroll Services

NorthgateArinso (NGA), a human resources services provider, and SuccessFactors today announced a partnership that will enable SuccessFactors Employee Central customers to take advantage of NGA’s global payroll services.

The partnership will provide Employee Central customers with a pre-built integration to euHReka, NGA’s global HR & payroll platform, which offers cloud-based payroll services in more than 100 countries.

For customers that wish to manage payroll in-house, SuccessFactors launched its own cloud-based payroll solution for Employee Central customers in July 2012. This offering will now be complemented with a range of BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) payroll options from NorthgateArinso, via its euHReka Inclusion Framework and supported by its global service centers. This allows Employee Central customers to choose between various options for global payroll, depending on their business requirements and service delivery preferences in various geographies.

As a result of the partnership, Employee Central customers will be able to outsource payroll to an additional specialist provider, and rapidly deploy managed payroll services globally, leveraging a fully localized and preconfigured payroll platform. NGA’s global payroll solution will seamlessly integrate with SuccessFactors using an out-of-the-box payroll solution. The connector will be generally available in early 2013.


Carahsoft Technology Corp, Government, Partnerships, Splunk

Carahsoft to Resell Splunk to Government Customers

SSplunk Inc. and Carahsoft Technology Corp. today announced an alliance under which Carahsoft will market, sell and distribute Splunk software to federal, state and local government agencies and the Splunk reseller partner ecosystem.

“Splunk software will enable Carahsoft and our reseller network to better equip agencies with big data management and security solutions needed for highly sensitive, mission critical environments,” said Craig P. Abod, Carahsoft president. “Splunk’s ability to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable makes it a core technology in our big data portfolio and a critical solution for our customers.”

With Splunk software, government entities can index, monitor, analyze and visualize massive volumes of valuable machine data generated by complex physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. Splunk helps agencies create real-time visibility across all agency servers and network devices by enabling agencies to create a single viewpoint to help investigate security incidents and address critical operations and application management functions.

“The government faces a paradox today with massive streams of data, real-time mission requirements and shrinking budgets,” said Bill Cull, vice president of public sector, Splunk. “Splunk software helps agencies to effectively analyze machine-generated big data, meet security and compliance standards and drastically cut operational costs. Our strategic alliance with Carahsoft will give agencies easier access to our products, allowing them to uncover data and improve operational intelligence to achieve mission success.”

For more information on Splunk, visit the intelligence solutions section of Carahsoft’s website or join Carahsoft and Splunk at the FedCyber.com Cyber Security Summit on Thursday, November 15, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Go to Splunk’s website to learn how Splunk works with government agencies and click here to download a free version of Splunk Enterprise.


Desktone, Desktop virtualization, Managed services, Partnerships, Total Cost of Ownership, Virtual desktop, Virtualization

Quest, Pivotal Technologies Partner to Deliver Desktops as a Cloud Service

Desktone, Inc., today announced a partnership between Quest, a cloud service provider, and Pivotal Technologies Group, a managed service provider. Based on the relationship, Pivotal will now offer Desktone-powered hosted Windows desktops provided by Quest as a managed service to businesses. The relationship represents an effective new way for service providers of all sizes to benefit from increasing demand for desktops as a cloud service. By providing the Desktone-powered DaaS offering to channel partners, Quest is able to expand their market opportunity while enabling managed service providers such as Pivotal the ability to offer virtual desktops without having to invest in costly infrastructure.

“We built the Desktone Platform from day one for service providers like Quest and Pivotal that are tasked with helping end user organizations increase IT efficiencies while keeping their budgets in check,” said David Grant, Vice President of Strategy, Desktone. “We have seen an explosion of interest from managed service providers (MSPs) that want to deliver DaaS but cannot build their own data centers. With DaaS, Quest is able to host and deploy virtual desktops from their data centers, making it easy for Pivotal to provision new desktops for end users whenever they’re needed without investing in costly hardware and software.”

“Quest is committed to its partners to capitalize on cloud computing opportunities like DaaS that are in the greatest demand among customers today,” said Adam Burke, Director of Quest’s Technology Partner Program. “Our partnership with Pivotal is a testament to the unique value proposition that Quest delivers as a partner of choice to accelerate their time to market and provide the greatest value of cloud services to their end customers.”

Small and mid-sized service providers often don’t have the capacity for hosted offerings. By leveraging Desktone’s multi-tenant DaaS solution, Quest can provide MSPs like Pivotal a simple, affordable way to offer virtual desktops to end user organizations. The multi-tenant architecture makes it easy to deliver secure, scalable virtual desktops as a cloud service without the expense and hassle of infrastructure integration and maintenance.

“Our customers look to Pivotal to solve their IT pain points. One of the biggest challenges we see is organizations looking to support mobile and remote workers,” said Jim Law, President, Pivotal Technologies Group. “We previously offered our customers desktops from a traditional VDI provider but found the service expensive and difficult to manage because of issues with speed and availability. By transitioning to the Quest DaaS model powered by Desktone we are able to streamline desktop management and improve reliability while reducing the price per desktop by half.”


B & L, Business Processes, Metalcaster, Partnerships, Progress

B & L, Progress Software Partner to Deliver Cloud-Based ERP for Metalcasters

Progress Software Corporation announced that B&L Information Systems, developers of metalcasting-specific ERP software, has successfully transformed its Odyssey ERP offering to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with the help of the Progress® OpenEdge® product.

B&L’s Odyssey software provides foundries and die casters with precise and timely information to balance customer satisfaction, operational efficiencies and profitability. With the help of Progress Software, B&L transformed its traditional ERP software to a SaaS model and doubled its close rate for the application. The Odyssey SaaS application offering outsold the traditional model by 300% in the first year and has seen a revenue increase of 880% since 2009. The SaaS model has enabled B&L to spend more time on site with customers instead of keeping up backend systems.

The Progress OpenEdge platform helps Progress’ Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) Partners build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device and any Cloud. The OpenEdge platform has evolved over the last 30 years incorporating new technologies such as multi-tenancy, data encryption and auditing, security and compliance and user-interface flexibility.

“Progress has given B&L the resources and support needed to grow our business beyond expectations,” said Matthew Gacek, vice president of Business Development for B&L Information Systems. “A major benefit for us was the Progress SaaS Empowerment Program, which helped B&L develop a business plan, determine costs, and market our applications. Progress’ tools, market intelligence and expertise are unmatched by any other provider we’ve looked into.”

Gacek continues: “Progress has allowed us to do two things very well. First, they have given us a rock solid platform to work with which means no crashes or downtime – that’s critical in our industry. Generally, our customers are smaller, privately held firms. They don’t have resources for a formal IT department. The Progress OpenEdge product has empowered us to give them a product that does not require a vast amount of maintenance resources, which, in turn, allows us to help them improve their bottom line.”

“Progress has always strived to provide our partners with the information and services needed for market success,” said Kimberly King, vice president, Global Partners and Channels for Progress Software. “It’s great to see that our Empowerment Program played a key role in growing B&L’s business, and our OpenEdge platform continues to provide loyal partners, like B&L, with new opportunities to drive their business forward.”


Actuate Corporation, ActuateOne, Big Data, Partnerships, VMware

Actuate, VMware to Deliver Faster Insights from Big Data in the Cloud

Actuate Corporation is partnering with VMware to provide a cost-effective way for companies to gain insight from any source of Big Data in hybrid cloud environments, by deploying seamless, dynamic and accessible business information solutions.

ActuateOne is designed to support private, public and SaaS (software as a service) cloud deployments by eliminating the need for hard-coded configuration, thereby enabling fast and easy deployment with VMware solutions. VMware solutions provide multiple benefits to IT administrators and users. VMware virtualization creates a layer of abstraction between the resources required by an application and operating system, and the underlying hardware that provides those resources.

Customers can extend the reliability and agility offered by the new VMware vFabric™ Data Director™ to their virtualized ActuateOne cluster, by provisioning and managing the data sources visualized in an Actuate dashboard as well as the vFabric Postgres database that manages the Encyclopedia Volumes of that ActuateOne deployment. This multi-layered coupling of ActuateOne upon VMware simplifies IT management tasks, while ensuring the highest levels of mission-critical availability, security and scalability for any Actuate / VMware deployment.

“We are pleased to be working with Actuate to provide our customers with a solution for analyzing and visualizing large data sets that reside in hybrid cloud environments,” said Fausto Ibarra, Senior Director, Product Management, VMware. “With VMware vFabric™ Data Director, VMware vFabric Postgres and ActuateOne, organizations can securely and efficiently extract actionable insights from their data to make informative business decisions.”

“Actuate’s technology scales linearly across any number of virtual instances, interfacing well with VMware solutions, and further delivering on the Actuate promise of better insights for better decision making by more people in the organization,” said Wenfeng Li, Vice President of Product Development at Actuate. “ActuateOne sources multiple instances of Big Data, merging it with traditional relational data via our data integration features, and then presents this blended content as interactive, customizable visualizations to large numbers of simultaneous users.”

ActuateOne – Actuate’s BI platform and suite of interactive applications built on open source BIRT – has already earned VMware Ready™ status. The VMware Ready designation signifies that ActuateOne has gone through VMware’s advanced testing and evaluation process to certify product compatibility. As part of the partnership, Actuate and VMware demonstrated linear scalability of ActuateOne in conjunction with VMware vSphere®, vFabric™ Data Director™, and VMware vFabric Postgres.

Together, the solution delivers three unique capabilities:

  • An efficient and secure approach to using shared infrastructure for
    servicing highly frequent requests
  • A standardized, portable, and extensible approach to enable workloads
    to be deployed across multiple clouds without manual configuration
  • Agile access to shared infrastructure for provisioning workloads in
    demand

 


Backup, Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, IceWEB, NovaStor, Partnerships, Storage

IceWEB Adding NovaStor Backup to Storage Appliances

IceWEB Inc., today announced they will bundle NovaSTOR’s Advanced Backup software with IceWEB’s Unified Storage Appliances.

“NovaSTOR is an excellent companion product for our IceWEB appliances because of its broad set of market applications,” said Rob Howe, IceWEB, CEO. “Their products span the same market spaces as ours—small, medium, large and cloud-based enterprises. They cover Windows, Linux, VMWare and Unix servers and clients in a myriad of configurations, mirroring our model. Because it is not always possible or cost-effective for companies to enable total unified storage protocols everywhere in their enterprise, we are providing significant additional value to our customers by enabling them to utilize NovaStor to target an IceWEB appliance in their network in order to satisfy their backup and disaster recovery needs for every location. Enabling them to have the ability to utilize a world-class product like NovaSTOR is yet another area in which IceWEB brings them excellent value when they purchase IceWEB products,” Howe concluded.


ChannelAdvisor, Funding, Kabbage, Partnerships, Working capital

ChannelAdvisor, Kabbage Partnership Offers Retailers Access to Capital

ChannelAdvisor, a  provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers to increase global sales, today announced its partnership with Kabbage Inc., an online provider of working capital for small businesses. This collaboration offers ChannelAdvisor customers direct access to a new source of funding in time for the 2012 holiday season.

Together, ChannelAdvisor and Kabbage offer online retailers a competitive advantage through the combination of advanced e-commerce software and immediate access to capital. Online retailers are able to use Kabbage to apply for and secure funding online within minutes. The funds can be used to stock up on inventory, expand channels, launch new marketing initiatives, hire staff and much more.

“ChannelAdvisor creates strategic partnerships that help retailers ramp up their sales, and our recent partnership with Kabbage provides our customers capital to fund their business needs,” said ChannelAdvisor Director of Business Development Jordan Weinstein. “Both ChannelAdvisor and Kabbage are key resources for any retailer who is looking to increase their marketplace volume. This opportunity is especially beneficial right before the holiday season, giving retailers a means to invest in new initiatives or inventory that will accelerate their sales in the coming months.”

“Many retailers are growing rapidly but lack the capital to truly take their business to the next level,” said Kabbage Chairman Marc Gorlin. “ChannelAdvisor is in the business of helping retailers grow and so are we, which is why this partnership makes so much sense. Together we are giving entrepreneurs access to the most trusted source of funding, used by thousands of small businesses to realize their growth potential.”

This new partnership has already benefitted Empire Security Cameras, a joint ChannelAdvisor and Kabbage customer, which is using Kabbage funds to implement advanced technology in order to efficiently scale its business.

“Connecting with Kabbage was a quick and easy process that allowed us to secure the funding that we needed to expand our online operations,” said Empire Security Cameras CEO Kyle Korona. “Traditional lending programs are not a fit for our business model, so being able to access much needed cash within minutes immediately changed our strategy. We were able to invest further in ChannelAdvisor software and additional marketing programs that ensure we are one of the most competitive security camera retailers on the internet.”


CA Technologies, Citrix, Citrix Systems, Citrix XenApp, Dell, Desktop virtualization, Partnerships, Virtualization, Webinar/Webcast/Presentation

News shorts from Citrix Synergy Barcelona (October 17-19)

CENTERM Exhibiting Cloud Terminal

CENTERM will exhibit its new desktop cloud terminal B20 and mobile cloud terminal CT Pad2, calling it “…a major step forward as the firm demonstrates its latest technological achievement in System-on-Chip (SoC) and Power-over-Ethernet (POE) after CENTERM made its first foray into the US and European markets when it announced the GM810 cloud terminal at Citrix Synergy San Francisco 2012 in May.”

The GM810 is certified as Citrix HDX Ready and ready to ship now.

CA, Citrix Partner

CA Technologies and Citrix announced that they are partnering to “help enterprises and service providers increase agility and productivity by providing additional management and monitoring capabilities on top of Citrix cloud and desktop virtualization solutions.”

New Mobile Enterprise Solutions

Citrix unveiled the next phase of its strategy to enable the mobile enterprise. With the advent of consumerization, mobility and the cloud, an increasingly mobile workforce is looking for easier ways to work the way they want – with anyone, from any location, on any device. With today’s announcements, Citrix gives customers of all sizes the Power to Say Yes to consumer-inspired mobile workstyles with an expanding portfolio of solutions that give employees the freedom and flexibility they want, combined with the security and control businesses need. Today’s announcements make it easier for companies of all sizes to go mobile – empowering employees to interact securely with any combination of data, apps and devices – then bringing it all together in a seamless, integrated experience for end users.

Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions with Citrix Products

Dell announced new additions and enhancements to its end-to-end cloud client computing portfolio. The solutions, which are specific to Citrix-based IT environments and now available in the US and Europe, are “…easy to select, deploy, and support, and deliver a cost effective and highly secure user experience to any device anywhere.”

Dell unveiled new vStart for VDI Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 reference architectures. Available in two configurations, vStart for VDI 50 and vStart for VDI 1000 are pre-engineered, pre-built and pre-integrated converged solutions that include Dell’s PowerEdge servers, EqalLogic or Compellent storage, PowerConnect or Force10 networking, Dell Wyse T10, Dell Wyse Xenith Pro and now Dell Wyse Xenith 2 thin- and zero-clients and management plug-ins. These VDI infrastructure solutions leverage XenDesktop and help organizations achieve benefits of desktop virtualization in a rapid, highly secure manner.

Dell is also updating its DVS Simplified Appliance this month to specifically address the cost and complexity challenges of virtual desktop adoption with new flexible server form factors, support for new hypervisors and additional new capabilities.

Citrix outlines strategy

Citrix unveiled the next stage of its strategy to help enterprises and service providers of all sizes deliver business-ready cloud services. Citrix revealed that Project Avalon will be delivered in two releases – code named Excalibur and Merlin.

The Excalibur release, available this quarter as a tech preview, will feature “…advancements in simplicity, scalability and rich multi-media services needed to deliver Windows apps and desktops to millions of new consumer style mobile devices. Excalibur will dramatically simplify the management of virtual apps and desktops, giving Citrix XenApp® and Citrix XenDesktop® customers a single unified way to design and deliver any mix of virtual applications and desktops from a common management console, and deliver them to end users with any mix of virtual delivery technologies.”

The Merlin release, available as a tech preview in the first half of next year, will “…bring cloud-style orchestration, self-service and deployment flexibility to XenApp and XenDesktop by integrating proven technology from products like Citrix CloudPlatform™ and Cloud Portal™. As a result, customers will be able to rapidly deploy personalized Windows apps and desktops in a flexible, private cloud environment across single or multiple sites, and utilize public clouds in a “capacity on demand” fashion to support fluctuating business needs.”


Canonical, Cinder, nova, Open Source, OpenStack, Partnerships, SolidFire, Storage

SolidFire, Canonical Deliver Deployable OpenStack Nova, Cinder

SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems for cloud service providers, announced today, in conjunction with Canonical, a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production- ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the OpenStack Summit, taking place October 15 through October 18 in San Diego.

John Griffith from SolidFire and David Medberry from Canonical will co-present the summit’s first workshop: “How to Deploy a Best-of-Breed OpenStack Compute and Block Storage Cloud” on Monday, October 15, at 9:50 a.m. local time. The session will include information on deployment tools, tips and tricks, targeted use cases, benchmark results and key enabling technologies.

“SolidFire has done a great job leading the Block Storage project in line with the OpenStack philosophy of delivering a pluggable architecture with integration points for multiple vendors and technologies,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s exciting to see more production implementations and configuration options available to OpenStack users.”

“Canonical has worked with SolidFire to ensure tight integration of Cinder into Ubuntu OpenStack packages to deliver a production-ready cloud infrastructure. As the reference operating system for OpenStack, Ubuntu was the natural choice to integrate with SolidFire’s solution,” commented Nick Barcet, Ubuntu cloud product manager at Canonical. “We believe SolidFire’s work in OpenStack is extremely important to the ecosystem, because it allows cloud providers to enhance their offering with high IOPS storage and unprecedented quality-of-service. They have also been leading the Cinder project in OpenStack to deliver a great abstraction layer that can be reused by other vendors to integrate their own solution.”

“Cinder has gotten off to a very successful start thanks to the hard work of more than 50 individual contributors,” said John Griffith, senior software engineer at SolidFire. “We delivered a deep feature set in our first release of Cinder, which allowed us to move quickly with Canonical in executing this powerful production-ready reference architecture for large-scale multi-tenant clouds.”

Key SolidFire-related features in the first OpenStack Cinder release include:

  • Full SolidFire driver integration
  • Ability to create, snapshot and manage SolidFire volumes using
    OpenStack clients and APIs
  • Ability to set and maintain true QoS levels on a per-volume basis
  • Ability to store instances on SolidFire volumes
  • Enhanced boot from volume options, including support for SolidFire
    volumes

SolidFire’s efforts around OpenStack are further evidence of its commitment to delivering proven, integrated storage solutions for its customers’ cloud infrastructures. This Cinder integration milestone follows SolidFire’s recently announced integration with major technology vendors across the cloud ecosystem.

Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfireinc | www.facebook.com/solidfire.


Asure, FotoPunch, Human Resources, Partnerships, Time Tracking

Asure Software Partners with FotoPunch for Mobile Employee Time Tracking

Asure Software announced that it has entered into a private label licensing agreement with FotoPunch, Inc. FotoPunch is a SaaS-based technology company that offers biometric and geospatial technology solutions to track employee time from virtually anywhere at anytime.

“We are very excited to be partnering with FotoPunch to offer mobile time and data collection solutions to our AsureForce™ Time & Labor Management (TLM) clients,” commented Pat Goepel, Asure’s Chief Executive Officer. “This partnership is in complete alignment with our strategy to quickly bring to market innovative, cloud-based solutions that work when, where and how workforces are operating today. FotoPunch technology is the first of its kind in the time and labor management industry.”

FotoPunch uses facial recognition and GPS software to allow employees to punch in and out using any mobile device, including smartphones, feature phones and dumbphones with a camera and SMS capabilities. When clients deploy this capability, they increase manager and employee productivity, reduce payroll costs, and avoid hardware costs. And users can access data without requiring Internet access, which is significant for highly mobile employees. The solution can also run through wall-mounted tablets in busy work areas.

From a workplace productivity perspective, managers have instant access to information via a web-based dashboard to track when and where employees are working, eliminate time fraud and stop buddy punching. FotoPunch also integrates with AsureForce TLM solutions and virtually any payroll solution.

“Our patent-pending technology will help expand Asure’s solution portfolio, but more importantly, this one-of-a-kind mobile technology provides truly measureable benefits to clients,” said Lance Ellsworth, Vice President of Business Development for FotoPunch.