For the more advanced users, ElefanteToolbar offers an “Advanced Installation” shortcut to an interface within the ResellersPanel control panel that allows the users to set the script configuration settings for themselves.

Nick Blaskov, Chief Financial Officer of ResellersPanel, explained:

“[ResellersPanel] users can now install popular PHP packages in seconds without any script installation knowledge…those who are more advanced can elect to manually install the script of their choice.”

The various scripts have many purposes, ranging from AdManagement, Blog software, Discussion Boards (Forums such as PHPbb), eCommerce, GroupWare Tools, Image Galleries, Web Hosting Tools, to Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Joomla, and Moodle.

ResellersPanel CFO NickBlaskov, said:

“[Our users] will be able to also select different design [templates] for their websites from the included template download menu and [preview their layouts through thumbnail pictures], and ResellersPanel will continue to automate the process of reselling web hosting services… in the future as well.”

Basically the Elefante toolbar from ResellersPanel will make it easy to create Wordpress and Joomla websites and pick a template. This is a very important feature.

David Wartell, Vice President of R1Soft, a division of BBS Technologies, said:

“The newly added InterWorx integration plays an essential role in helping extend R1Soft’s reach to more Linux users as we strive to continually increase the compatibility of our products.”

The new offering is packaged as an add-on module that allows the server root administrators (superuser) to allow shared hosting user access through the InterWorx “Nodeworx” control panel. With authorized access, users can securely view and restore backups.

Paul Oehler, Chief Technical Officer of INTERWORX LLC, said:

“As anyone in the [web hosting industry] can tell you, backups are mission critical. That’s why R1Soft’s products fit so well. In fact, InterWorx and R1Soft already have many customers in common, which is why I’m excited to provide the new R1Soft Plugin within the InterWorx Hosting Control Panel… giving the end user quick and easy access to their R1Soft backups from within InterWorx, the server administrator can use the InterWorx web interface to easily configure which users have access to the data backups, providing tighter integration than with other control panels.”

For current users of the latest InterWorx 4.0 build, presuming you have R1Soft on the same box, it is already in effect. The improvements to SiteWorx/NodeWorx are immediately visible. With SiteWorx, edit your account and you can see there is an option for R1Soft access control (on by default). For SiteWorx, look in the “Backup/Restore” area for the new R1Soft section.

The company provides a bullet list of the benefits of the “Total Email Management Suite” solution:

• Automatic email archiving for up to 10 years of secure email storage in a off-site location
• eDiscovery – Offers eDiscovery and other review tools, giving greater search and analytical ability
• Continuity service for email – this allows for regular access of email even during disasters. A form of crisis recovery.
• Spam protection and antivirus protection – IronMountain claims to stop 99 percent of spam, and has what they call a “perfect track record” for stopping viruses. Presumably, a computer virus has never infiltrated.
• Data Leak Prevention – Allows the detection and prevention of the critical information within emails and attachments from being leaked to unauthorized persons.
• Retention Management & Litigation Hold – Emails can be retained based upon the content policy of the company to prevent legal problems, or for user preferences.

RichardEllis, Iron Mountain Digital Manager (for UK & Ireland), said:

“As [companies] today continue to face significant risks and costs when it comes to email, the ability to securely manage and protect digital information has become more critical than ever before. Just as customers have been turning to IronMountain for the storage and protection of their physical records, Iron Mountain Digital’s Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) model offers secure, cost-effective storage and access to digital information, including email.”

Richard has a good point. Though his peculiar use of the phrase “Storage-as-a-Service” (SaaS) conflicts with the term “Software-as-a-Service” (also SaaS). Perhaps the storage industry needs to develop a new phrase to avoid the confusion down the line. My suggestion is Data-storage-as-a-Service (DaaS) to avoid the confusion.

Richard Ellis of IronMountain goes on to say:

“The Total Email Management Suite is a critical component of our digital archiving strategy – providing the rich functionality needed to protect and manage emails, enterprise-class security and necessary functionality in case of litigation, not to mention the peace of mind of a secure IronMountain hosted solution.”

“Iron Mountain” says that the amount of email that the average internet user receives (per capita) is growing annually, as well as the sheer volume of electronic mail in general. For the constant and evolving resource, management, and regulatory threats that companies deal with, ‘Iron Mountain’ offers the “Total Email Management Suite”.

Mark Reeves, Senior Vice President of MimeCast EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Asia), said:

“IronMountainDigital customers can now benefit from the combination of Iron Mountain’s expertise on legal discovery coupled with a robust email archiving and management solution, delivered securely via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.”

Mimecast and Iron Mountain Digital had formed a “technology alliance” in April 2009. This new digital archiving solution seems to be the brainchild of these two companies working together.

Henning Kettler, Chief Technical Officer of 1&1 web hosting, stated:

“In the end, we found that Nimsoft was the only solution that met our requirements for scalability, ease, and off-the-shelf capabilities, while at the same time delivering the flexibility we’d need to adapt to our evolving requirements. As a result, we’re able to deploy quickly and get immediate benefits and have confidence that the solution will deliver value in the long term.”

1&1 mentioned Nimsoft offered the “ideal solution” with their distributed architecture and security model. 1&1 webhosting was referring to the “Nimsoft Unified Monitoring Architecture” which offers complete visibility for the performance and availability of business applications for both internal IT infrastructures as well as external IT infrastructures. Nimsoft is equipped to handle any potential customer’s needs: whether SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or even PaaS (Platform as a Service).

GaryRead, Nimsoft President and CEO, says:

“1&1’s selection of Nimsoft is a tremendous testament to the scalability of our solution. With NMS, 1&1 gains the ability to efficiently monitor its vast infrastructure, and so reduce administrative time and expense, while at the same time boosting the availability and performance of its services.”

1&1 web hosting was especially concerned about scalability and security. As the world’s largest webhost, 1&1 has a need to aggregate massive amounts of monitoring data that is unparalleled.

Juergen Geck, Chief Technical Officer of Open-Xchange, said:

“SugarCRM is the first software to build on the social networking capabilities in Open-Xchange, which opens the potential for a whole new class of integrated solutions. Social Open-Xchange in combination with SugarCRM will create an ecosystem of data that spans many social networks and software programs.”

The information will be formatted for smooth integration with the SugarCRM application. The SugarCRM data, which is importable to Open-Xchange, can be accessed via smartphone or published directly to the internet. All of this is critical for what SugarCRM delivers. In a nutshell, “Customer relationship management” (CRM) with social media involves monitoring what’s being said about a company on Twitter. Salesforce made an entry into the social media market, specifically “social CRM “, but didn’t allow for prioritizing the more important twitter users (accounts with more profiles) who may be commenting on a company. The industry is in dire need of this, especially when there is a lot being said about a company.

Clint Oram, vice president of products and co-founder of SugarCRM, mentioned:

“We see incredible potential for data integration, for Social CRM. The focus of the IT industry is moving towards how data can be shared among users to increase knowledge among groups of people. We believe pooling previously disparate islands of information can deliver additional value to our users.”

Currently, Open-Xchange operates on a Micro Format (microformats.org). The Open-Xchange Micro Format allows for the convenient importation and exporting of data from social networks to SaaS or hosted systems. The new combination “SugarOXMF” is available at www.sugarforge.org/projects/sugaroxmf and the testing server for Open-Xchange is http://ox.io

Imin Lee (曾毅敏), CEO of AccelOps, says:

“We are delighted with the support that the VMware TAP program provides. Delivering our virtual appliance and SaaS application leveraging the VMware platform is an essential differentiator that well positions us to serve the mid-tier enterprise. With AccelOps, users can proactively manage and optimize their physical and virtual environments to assure service delivery and gain operational efficiency. We look forward to introducing our integrated datacenter management solution to VMware’s partners and end-users.”

AccelOps contends that the new VMware solution will bring greater reliability to their services. In order to have better performance, availability and security, transparency is critical. The VMware virtual appliance gives that transparency to business services and “automatically discovers and monitors” the important aspects of the physical and virtual business environments.

Bernie Mills, Senior Director of alliance programs at VMware, stated:

“We are excited to welcome AccelOps as a member of the VMware TAP program. The VMware TAP program offers companies like AccelOps the tools and resources they need to develop high-value solutions that meet the needs of our mutual customers.”

The partnership will help bring a new innovative solution to Accelops, as well as bring a new partenr to VMware. It will help manage costs, resources, and optimize the virtual and physical environments. In this way, it will benefit both the companies and the customers.

Paul Tourret, Managing Director of GlobalSign, said:

“GlobalSign is very pleased that AB Connect is joining our Partner Program and will provide a full range of SSL Certificates to its large international hosting customer base. GlobalSign’s Partner Program provides web hosts the ability to generate an extra revenue stream from a competitive product line by offering a product that their customers require and already buy from elsewhere.”

As AB Connect and their flagship Hosteur.com manage tens of thousands of domains and websites, it is critical for the French company to provide reliable security solutions for their customers. With the persistent and advanced threats of online fraud and phishing attacks, website security is of the utmost concern. ABConnect had a previous SSL provider, however they decided to make the switch as they were looking for a company that could better provide for their SSL reseller web hosting program.

Laurent Escart, Sales Director of AB Connect, stated:

“GlobalSign’s Partner Program will enable AB Connect to offer SSL solutions that secure our customers’ websites quickly and efficiently. We want to be able to provide a safe and secure environment for our customer’s website visitors. We chose to partner with GlobalSign as they listened to our organization specific requirements and were able to provide the perfect SSL reseller solution that fitted neatly within our hosting platform.”

The new SSL offering will provide quick issuance Domain validated SSL as well as the usual Organization validated SSL. More importantly, it will offer the advanced Extended Validated SSL, which many web browsers are aware of: it greenlights the address bar in new high security internet browsers such as IE8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

The partnership is between GlobalSign (which has websites in English, German, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese) and the French AB Connect (hosteur.com) should be mutually beneficial. GlobalSign was established over a decade ago, to serve Secure Sockets Layer certificates with a focus in Europe, but has expanded into the American market as well.

Terremark’s team of disaster recovery experts has time-tested the framework ensure it provides customers’ the proper protection for business critical environments, all the while allowing the customers to avoid the costs or complexity of maintaining all of their server and networking infrastructure at a secondary location. Terremark went on to explain that ShawCor Ltd., their energy service company, provides a flexible framework to reduce risk, consulting expenses, as well as implementation costs. Utilizing on-demand scalability in Terremark’s services has given ShawCor the ability to dynamically add capacity above the baseline requirement to meet emerging needs.

Paul Gibson, ShawCor’s IT Manager, stated:

“With operations that span seven divisions around the world, the consistent availability of our core applications are fundamentally critical to the success of our company. By utilizing the cost-effective, cloud-based disaster recovery solution Terremark offers, we were able to replace a large capital expense with an affordable and predictable recurring charge while maximizing the uptime for our mission-critical systems. Terremark’s solution provides full recovery capabilities in 15 minutes, which we have successfully tested from our Houston data center to the NAP of the Americas.”

In partnership with NetApp storage and utilizing VMware’s vSphere technologies, Terremark also offers application-based, host-based, and array-based replication options for their customers. The source servers can be either physical or virtual.  Terremark also offers managed security services  including “intrusion detection”, various firewall services, log aggregation, as well as on-demand backup services, managed by Terremark.

Patrick Rogers, Vice President of Solutions Marketing for NetApp, mentioned:

“With customers searching for disaster recovery solutions that provide quick, reliable access to their environments at a fraction of the cost, services based on proven technologies like Terremark’s cloud-based offering present an ideal solution. With NetApp’s industry-leading storage platform acting as a critical component for its offering, we believe Terremark’s cloud-enabled disaster recovery solution will quickly become a solution of choice for enterprises and Federal agencies.”

The collaboration of the various entities, Terrmark, ShawCor, and NetApp shows the planning involved in this new solution. The comprehensive “disaster recovery solution” covers all aspects: security, energy, data replication, and data center failover. The new offering is impressive and appears properly planned. All companies involved should benefit from the arrangement, which aims to provide a superior disaster recovery solution for enterprise-class cloud hosting customers.

‘Christopher Day’, Terremark’s Chief Security Architect stated:

“Within enterprises and Federal government agencies, security in the cloud is a primary concern and protecting customers against network threats is vital to the overall security of any cloud infrastructure. Terremark’s recognized team of security experts combine their vast experience and knowledge in dealing with today’s most sophisticated cyberthreats with leading technologies like NextGen to allow customers across our stack of services a way to proactively identify, detect, and mitigate security problems.”

Terremark goes on to explain how NetWitness NextGen is the best company to provide their customers with network security visibility and monitoring services. Terrremark places confidence in NextGen’s ability to stop the “advanced persistent” security threats that companies today face from a wide variety of nefarious organizations or in many cases even from the competition. Sometimes the threat is not always from outside. NextGen also aims to help companies with insider threat management and protect them from critical data leakage.  NetWitness’ NextGen also focuses on the problems of  designer malware, zero-day detection, and network e-discovery.

Amit Yoran, CEO of NetWitness Corporation, declared:

“NetWitness is honored to be working closely with Terremark to provide advanced protection for its customers in the public and private sectors. As government and commercial organizations move to cloud computing and managed security operations centers, the combination of Terremark’s enhanced security solutions with the unique analytics and threat intelligence provided by NetWitness NextGen provides a force multiplier to reduce the risk associated with network threats.”

The Terremark-NetWitness partnership should benefit both companies greatly. This will provide a valuable new service to Terremark’s managed hosting and cloud hosting/computing customers, as well as bring a new revenue source to NetWitness.