Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, has announced the launch of the industry's first international transaction web-performance benchmark. The new Compuware Gomez benchmark measures the web performance of a multi-step banking transaction for leading UK banking institutions. Co-operative Bank provided the best response time across eleven companies in the new benchmark.
The UK Banking Account Details Business Process (www.gomez.com/uk-banking-account-details-business-pro... ) benchmark emulates a typical banking transaction to review account details across multiple pages from account login to account summary and logout. It uses a real end-user account across three metrics - response time, availability and consistency. This real-world view of web performance helps companies better understand the experiences being delivered to their customers.
"A first step towards optimizing website performance to meet customers' expectations is comparison to top companies in your industry," pointed out Jonathan Ranger, Gomez Benchmark Practice Director at Compuware. "Leading banking institutions in the UK that use the new transaction benchmark to track and measure the performance of their transactions gain a fundamental measurement of the quality of their customers' online experiences."
Gomez Benchmarks are an impartial, quantitative measurement of comparative web and mobile site performance and rank the web and mobile performance of companies across three key metrics:
Response Time — measures the time elapsed while downloading a page or an entire multistep transaction process.
Availability — measures the percentage of successfully completed tests out of total test attempts for the measurement period.
Consistency — measures the standard deviation of the response time of successful tests completed.
Benchmarks are used by organizations to compare and track performance against competitors and market leaders; baseline and track performance over time; and as key indicators of success for business and IT site owners. Gomez publishes hundreds of global web and mobile performance benchmarks based on more than 20 million monthly tests across 3,000 companies in 13 countries and include:
Home Page Backbone Benchmarks: measure the performance of the website's home page from the Internet Backbone.
Home Page Last Mile Benchmarks: measure the performance of the home page from the end user's desktop taking into account the real user's connection speed.
Transaction Benchmarks: measure the performance of a key business process such as ordering a product or making a stock trade.
Mobile Benchmarks: measure the performance of mobile site's home page on the largest carriers and top devices.
The Gomez platform is the industry's leading solution for optimizing the performance of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Gomez provides a unified view across the entire application delivery chain, from a user's browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud, to inside the data center, eliminating blind spots from the First Mile to the Last Mile.
FACTFILE:
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world's most important technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: www.compuware.com.
Thursday, 12 April 2012
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
#OracleWinner – e-DBA named Oracle Technology Partner of the Year 2012
This accolade comes ahead of the forthcoming Oracle Customer awards where two e-DBA customers have been shortlisted for the solutions e-DBA provided them with.
The ‘Oracle Technology Partner of the Year’ award is considered to be one of the top prizes of the evening as it recognizes innovation, Oracle revenue growth, successful adoption of new Oracle technology and diversity from competition.
Alex Louth, Managing Director “We are delighted to come away with this award and be recognized for all the hard work our team has done to ensure our customer can benefit from the latest Oracle technology. ” he added “We are very excited about the next 12 months, as we adopt even more Oracle technology, and are becoming a true Engineered Systems partner which can only benefit our customers and Oracle”
This award tops a very successful 12 months for e-DBA having completed an MBO, moved to larger premises, been awarded several new Oracle Exadata projects, and made significant investment in new Oracle Technology such as the Oracle Database Appliance and BigData.
Engineered Systems, the Oracle Exa stack and the future
Having won this award in 2010 and now again in 2012, this really shows how fast e-DBA are growing and how well their Oracle practice is maturing in both product and service units.
e-DBA have been one of the first partners to truly adopt Oracle’s ‘Engineered Systems’ strategy and have already started implementing end to end solutions from the Oracle Red Stack. Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) have been key to e-DBA’s success in taking the ‘Engineered Systems’ message to customers.
James Anthony, Technology Director “Having won this award for a second time, it really shows our commitment to Oracle and how well we have been able to adopt and deliver the latest Oracle Technology. he added “2012 is going to be a great year for e-DBA, this award is a great start and really puts us a stride ahead of our competitors but more importantly, we hope to share our success with our customers and Oracle”
FACTFILE:
e-DBA, a specialised Oracle Platinum Partner and Oracle Technology Partner of the year. e-DBA specialises in providing Oracle Managed, professional and license services as well as offering engineered systems solutions such as the Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics and Oracle BigData.
e-DBA has 2 offices, one in Chelmsford (Head office) and another in Brighton. With customers spanning across all vertical markets and industries, e-DBA is perfectly positioned to provide a full technology solution to ensure your business IT needs are met. e-DBA employs a team of highly skilled Oracle technology experts who ensure all of your technical and commercial requirements are fulfilled. To learn more about e-DBA, please visit www.e-dba.com
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Star provides cloud makeover at Nirvana Spa
Wellbeing business re-invigorated with new IT approach
Star, a provider of on-demand cloud computing and communication services to UK businesses, today announced that the award-winning spa and health club, Nirvana Spa has laid a platform for growth based on Star cloud services across its businesses.
One of only three UK spas with its own underground water source, Nirvana Spa has provided discerning clientele with wellbeing treatments for over thirty years. Star collaborated with Nirvana Spa on {a radical makeover of its IT systems including wireless hotspots for customers and state-of-the-art unified communications for staff.
The decision to standardise on Star cloud services was part of a three year strategy to transform Nirvana Spa into a modern data-driven business that is capable of achieving and accommodating growth without adding cost and complexity to its IT systems. Having had a long standing relationship with Star, Nirvana Spa felt it played a role in the strategic development of IT systems and services.
IT Director Mark Tocher commented, “Star was selected as our cloud services provider because we could see the value of buying into its pre-integrated WorkLife productivity suite. But the deciding factor was our trust in Star as a long term partner.”
Paul Watson, interim CEO at Star said, “We are delighted to collaborate with Nirvana Spa on this make-over of its IT systems. A secure and resilient virtual private cloud, delivered from a shared platform will help to keep costs low for the company whilst allowing it to access leading technologies often taken for granted by much larger enterprises.”
Star, a provider of on-demand cloud computing and communication services to UK businesses, today announced that the award-winning spa and health club, Nirvana Spa has laid a platform for growth based on Star cloud services across its businesses.
One of only three UK spas with its own underground water source, Nirvana Spa has provided discerning clientele with wellbeing treatments for over thirty years. Star collaborated with Nirvana Spa on {a radical makeover of its IT systems including wireless hotspots for customers and state-of-the-art unified communications for staff.
The decision to standardise on Star cloud services was part of a three year strategy to transform Nirvana Spa into a modern data-driven business that is capable of achieving and accommodating growth without adding cost and complexity to its IT systems. Having had a long standing relationship with Star, Nirvana Spa felt it played a role in the strategic development of IT systems and services.
IT Director Mark Tocher commented, “Star was selected as our cloud services provider because we could see the value of buying into its pre-integrated WorkLife productivity suite. But the deciding factor was our trust in Star as a long term partner.”
Paul Watson, interim CEO at Star said, “We are delighted to collaborate with Nirvana Spa on this make-over of its IT systems. A secure and resilient virtual private cloud, delivered from a shared platform will help to keep costs low for the company whilst allowing it to access leading technologies often taken for granted by much larger enterprises.”
Sunday, 8 April 2012
That's Entertainment News: Fasthosts, GameShadow and epic.LAN join forces for...
That's Entertainment News: Fasthosts, GameShadow and epic.LAN join forces for...: Fasthosts, GameShadow and epic.LAN have joined forces to launch GameShadow Battles, a fant...
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
Exeter University utilises new Archiving solution from C2C
C2C, a provider of email, file and messaging management solutions has announced that one of the top performing UK universities, Exeter University, has adopted ArchiveOne® to manage their 3,500 staff plus associates and group mailboxes. In terms of the IT infrastructure, Exeter University has 20 virtualised Exchange servers split across the two sites that are either clustered or set up as DAGs (for data replication). ArchiveOne is deployed on 6 virtualised archiving servers supporting an extensive email infrastructure, with more than 37,000 mailboxes contained within the Active Directory.
Like all academic establishments, the University in recent years has seen unprecedented growth in the size and volume of email not only as coursework files but right across the infrastructure, as departments have become more reliant on large image-based files, PDFs and PPTs.
Dave Dickinson is the Universities’ Information Systems Developer responsible for all email system infrastructure and takes up the story: “We were in the process of migrating from a UNIX-based email system. This was an effective, simple, pure flat-file email system that was not particularly resource intensive, but it did not offer the extra features, such as calendaring and workflow that we deemed as essential. We therefore embarked on the move to Microsoft Exchange 2003 and then later to Exchange 2007.”
There were a number of changes that the University had to adopt as part of the migration to Microsoft Exchange. The first was to include high-performing shared storage into the infrastructure and the second was to identify an effective archiving solution. Critical requirements for this solution included both the ability to handle the increasingly large volumes of email and the capacity to reduce the burden of Exchange which demanded far greater resources than their Unix-based system. After examining three market-leading solutions, the team opted for C2C’s ArchiveOne solution due to its flexibility and seamless end user experience.
With 7TB of primary storage assigned to run Exchange, it had been critical that the archiving solution quickly and effectively moved data to the archive store reducing the impact on primary storage. ArchiveOne stored the files in a compressed format so the demand on secondary storage was reduced as well. On top of this infrastructure challenge, there was a cultural challenge that users needed to overcome. The previous UNIX-based system offered users unlimited email space, so they became accustomed to keeping an unrestricted amount of email. The transition to Exchange with its mailbox quotas had caused users to implement PST files resulting in difficulties with backup and data discovery.
The installation of ArchiveOne provided the management team with an archiving solution that meant they seamlessly regained control over mailbox stores and quotas. A solution of policy enforcement was created for staff and associate mailboxes, comprising approximately 5000 mailboxes.
Critically, ArchiveOne has enabled automated policies with two standard policies in place. For average mailbox users, any emails older than 12 months are automatically archived and compressed to an archive store. For those ‘power users’ whose mailboxes regularly exceed 750MB, ArchiveOne automates an archiving policy of six months. These archiving policies enable the email system to run at an optimal 70% capacity of primary disk. For users, the process is simple, they simply click on the email in the inbox, and the full email is located and retrieved seamlessly from the store.
For Dave and the team, the ability to manipulate and customise archiving policies has proven invaluable. “When we initially installed the archiving system, we installed five archive repositories. Since then we have installed additional archives on an annual basis. What we found when using ArchiveOne is that its policies were flexible and adaptable to our needs.
"For instance, we would be able to move to a six month repository cycle easily if data growth required, and we are able to extend policies to individual users with no impact.”
One of the most significant benefits of archiving is reducing the impact of an Exchange upgrade. Moving the majority of data to the archive before the migration alleviates the need for the data to be moved when upgrading between the Exchange versions. Since the majority of data had already been moved prior to the upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2007, time and management overhead was significantly reduced. Indeed, so has storage capacity declined. Two years down the line, ArchiveOne has alleviated the need for any further primary storage, ensuring major cost savings and fewer problems for the Infrastructure team.
For users with ArchiveOne, archiving is seamless and automatic, and of course, now falls within the blanket protection of the Exchange backup. With the majority of data in the archive, the benefits to an Exchange upgrade have already been realised. In 2012 the University will upgrade to Exchange 2010 and the benefits of not having to move all the data will be realised once more. The process will be relatively quick and less demanding on the University.
In conclusion, Dave comments, “Put simply, I couldn’t imagine not having ArchiveOne operating seamlessly behind the university’s email infrastructure. It is an easy-to-use, flexible and valuable tool.”
For more information visit www.c2c.com.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Back-up protocols often ignore security devices
Uncovered during research conducted by QuoCirca, for Osirium, the lack of back-up processes associated with security devices became quickly apparent. The study found that in around 50% of organisations, such devices do not get backed up weekly, and fewer than 30% ran back-ups daily. It was also found that device problems would often take hours to get them functioning again, particularly if the system administrator needed to rebuild the device using out of date settings or, in the worst case, from scratch.
“The risk value of backing up these devices should not be under-estimated,” said David Guyatt, CEO at Osirium. “Firewalls often have complex rules programmed into them whilst content filtering devices contain policies about what users can and cannot do with content, so the operational risk from losing these security services without any reliable backup and restore process escalates considerably.
Most organisations use a wide range of security devices from an equally wide range of network and security vendors, so the issue in question perhaps becomes more about managing the many different back-up protocols associated with each vendor device because they’re often seen as complex, costly and resource intensive. Organisations often don’t allocate sufficient budget to manage this adequately, which was further reflected in the research statistic that 42% of organisations have 30 day gaps between backing-up security devices”.
Whilst organisations do try to backup critical devices and servers at regular intervals these are often conducted under excessive workloads. Back-up goals get compromised so critical servers become a priority whilst back-ups on the less obvious, but just as important infrastructure devices, are often delayed,
Guyatt continued, “Rather than having a specific backup up process in place for each device Osirium offers a single interface, multi-vendor solution that automates these back-ups across a wide range of products to bring control back within the organisation.”
Specifically, Osirium allows organisations to schedule, or select, individual device configuration back-ups and automatically scale the task across multi-vendor infrastructures as well as running back-ups before and after configuration changes, to provide ’roll-back’ services. Furthermore, Osirium can also delegate backup initiatives to other parties, such as help desks, which allows them to execute back-ups without needing full system administrator access.
FACTFILE:
The research was completed by Quocirca and 100 interviews were collected. At the time of answering the questions, those surveyed were not aware that the research was being conducted on behalf of Osirium. Respondents were qualified in as follows:
- Must be involved in IT management with one of the following job functions: IT manager, IT security manager, IT infrastructure manager
- Must answer yes to: “are you involved with, or knowledgeable in how your organisation views and manages issues relating to privileged users (that is how the granting of the extra privileges that IT administrators require to do their jobs is controlled), the automation of IT admin tasks and how these issues relate to your organisation’s ability to meet the regulatory requirements that govern it?”
Osirium drives down operational risk and eases the pain of managing and maintaining multi-vendor IT infrastructures by providing a central, secure access point and a “built-in” best practice foundation which tracks all SysAdmin changes in the infrastructure and allows you to easily meet and maintain compliance.
Osirium dramatically improves productivity and reduces human error by automating routine and repetitive SysAdmin tasks and delegating them to less costly help desk staff, to provide faster problem resolutions with fewer errors.
Osirium is establishing itself as a new and unique IT infrastructure security solution and is already helping some of the world’s biggest brands and public sector bodies.
For more information please see: www.osirium.com
That's Business: Looking forward to data centre awards
That's Business: Looking forward to data centre awards: The Judges Panel of the 5th annual Datacentre Awards which takes place in London 13 June have received a record number of submissions from ...
Monday, 2 April 2012
Ipswitch Network Management Division Wins Network Monitoring Product of the Year Accolade at Network Computing Awards 2012
WhatsUp Gold Delivers Everything IT Admins Need Through a Single Console
Ipswitch, Inc.‘s Network Management Division, developer of WhatsUp Gold suite of IT management software, today announced that following a vote of over 20,000 readers and industry analysts, WhatsUp Gold has been named Network Computing’s Network Management Product of the Year 2012. Additionally to winning the award, Ipswitch founder CEO, Roger Greene was the runner up in the Contribution to ICT award.
The Network Computing Awards were launched in 2007 to recognise the companies, products, services that have most impressed the readers of one of the longest established computer networking publications. New to this years‘ awards were individual excellence awards, that were chosen by the editors of the Network Computing Awards. Winning the award continues WhatsUp Gold’s impressive track record at the Network Computing Awards. It won the award in 2010 and has been a runner up in 2008, 2009 and 2011.
“We are pleased to have been awarded the highly regarded award from Network Computing for 2012. It underlines our commitment and vision of delivering a highly innovative and agile network management solution that will provide real tangible benefits for organisations of all sizes,“ said Ipswitch Network Management Division President, Ennio Carboni. “As the industry keeps moving forward, we are looking to continue to provide solutions that meet the IT management challenges of today, whether it is pure network management and monitoring or assisting organisations in monitoring their virtualised and cloud computing environments.“
“We would like to congratulate Ipswitch Network Management Division and all the other winners and finalists on their success,” said Dave Bonner, event manager, Network Computing Awards. “This years’ event was another record-breaker since the launch of the awards, with record number of nominations and votes pouring in. WhatsUp Gold continues to impress on the market and our readers’ votes clearly highlight its importance to businesses of all sizes.”
For businesses with networks of all sizes, WhatsUp Gold offers a comprehensive yet cost-effective network and application management solution that installs, discovers and maps network-connected assets in under an hour. With WhatsUp Gold’s powerful SNMP v1-3, SSH, Telnet and WMI monitoring, alerting and notification capabilities, users have 360 degree visibility, actionable intelligence and complete control over their networks.
About the Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc.
The Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc. is the developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT management software. WhatsUp Gold is deployed on over 150,000 networks worldwide and delivers comprehensive network, system, application and event log monitoring and management solutions for small and medium businesses and enterprises. The award winning solution supports a wide range of IT management tasks including automated discovery, mapping, real-time monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and reporting.
Founded in 1991 and currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, Ipswitch, Inc. is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, and has offices in Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia, Madison, Wisconsin, Livonia, Michigan, as well as its European headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Asia Pacific headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. Ipswitch sells its products through distributors, resellers and OEMs worldwide.
To learn more about WhatsUp Gold, please visit:
http://www.whatsupgold.com/products/download/
Ipswitch, Inc.‘s Network Management Division, developer of WhatsUp Gold suite of IT management software, today announced that following a vote of over 20,000 readers and industry analysts, WhatsUp Gold has been named Network Computing’s Network Management Product of the Year 2012. Additionally to winning the award, Ipswitch founder CEO, Roger Greene was the runner up in the Contribution to ICT award.
The Network Computing Awards were launched in 2007 to recognise the companies, products, services that have most impressed the readers of one of the longest established computer networking publications. New to this years‘ awards were individual excellence awards, that were chosen by the editors of the Network Computing Awards. Winning the award continues WhatsUp Gold’s impressive track record at the Network Computing Awards. It won the award in 2010 and has been a runner up in 2008, 2009 and 2011.
“We are pleased to have been awarded the highly regarded award from Network Computing for 2012. It underlines our commitment and vision of delivering a highly innovative and agile network management solution that will provide real tangible benefits for organisations of all sizes,“ said Ipswitch Network Management Division President, Ennio Carboni. “As the industry keeps moving forward, we are looking to continue to provide solutions that meet the IT management challenges of today, whether it is pure network management and monitoring or assisting organisations in monitoring their virtualised and cloud computing environments.“
“We would like to congratulate Ipswitch Network Management Division and all the other winners and finalists on their success,” said Dave Bonner, event manager, Network Computing Awards. “This years’ event was another record-breaker since the launch of the awards, with record number of nominations and votes pouring in. WhatsUp Gold continues to impress on the market and our readers’ votes clearly highlight its importance to businesses of all sizes.”
For businesses with networks of all sizes, WhatsUp Gold offers a comprehensive yet cost-effective network and application management solution that installs, discovers and maps network-connected assets in under an hour. With WhatsUp Gold’s powerful SNMP v1-3, SSH, Telnet and WMI monitoring, alerting and notification capabilities, users have 360 degree visibility, actionable intelligence and complete control over their networks.
About the Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc.
The Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc. is the developer of the WhatsUp Gold suite of innovative IT management software. WhatsUp Gold is deployed on over 150,000 networks worldwide and delivers comprehensive network, system, application and event log monitoring and management solutions for small and medium businesses and enterprises. The award winning solution supports a wide range of IT management tasks including automated discovery, mapping, real-time monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and reporting.
Founded in 1991 and currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, Ipswitch, Inc. is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, and has offices in Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia, Madison, Wisconsin, Livonia, Michigan, as well as its European headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Asia Pacific headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. Ipswitch sells its products through distributors, resellers and OEMs worldwide.
To learn more about WhatsUp Gold, please visit:
http://www.whatsupgold.com/products/download/
That's Business: Offices in the Cloud: how Virtual Offices benefit ...
That's Business: Offices in the Cloud: how Virtual Offices benefit ...: Steve Turner Vice President of IT Optimisation at Intergence predicts that by 2020, around 80 per cent of employees may be work...
Comply Serve strengthens top team
In their new roles Alan and Richard have been given the vital roles of driving momentum forward in key accounts and with prospects in order to build on recent company successes which include adding recognised brands such as Etihad Rail, Banedanmark and Laing O’Rourke (amongst others) to the client roster.
Alan brings with him a wealth of experience from his past work in Business Development and Channel and Alliance Manager positions. In this role of Account Director, Alan will work in partnership with clients to drive further value from joint collaborations, delivering major rail projects and high value annual workbanks employing ComplyPro. In recent roles he has also managed business relationships with Network Rail, London Underground, Centrica and Thales positioning complex solutions to complex business problems.
Richard has worked in construction since 1981 and his portfolio of projects include the New British Library and Sizewell ‘B’ power station, as well as an assortment of more traditional commercial, retail and public sector projects. He has extensive experience in procuring, implementing and managing new processes, which was further recognised when he was given a remit to report on the strategic management of IT across a group of companies. Richard is a fellow of The Chartered Institute of Building
“I am delighted to welcome both Alan and Richard to the team,” said Don Cameron, Sales and Marketing Director at Comply Serve. “Comply Serve has ambitious growth plans in place for this year and the targets set are not for the faint-hearted. I am confident that both individuals can, and will, hit the ground running and will become key players in no time.”
ComplyPro™, Comply Serve’s flagship product, enables major infrastructure programmes to get complex compliance and assurance processes under control by providing unprecedented visibility of assurance and compliance progress against well-defined delivery objectives.
FAVTFILE:
Comply Serve provides unique, web-based project and product compliance solutions to clients operating in highly regulated industries. Its core product ComplyPro, focuses in markets where there is a need to address complex compliance and assurance goals on high risk, high value programmes of work. ComplyPro began life as a system designed for transport projects, in particular for rail and infrastructure projects. Whilst the solution has evolved to encompass a wider range of industries, the core product is still ideally placed as the only compliance and assurance project system on the market place today for the rail and transport industries.
ComplyPro to date has been used in a number of high profile, international projects such as Crossrail, Etihad Rail, East London Line and Banedanmark and is adept at handling the various intricacies and characteristics of large infrastructure projects.
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