Zurich Insurance PLC Deploys Accenture Duck Creek Policy for Core Processing of Multiple Lines of Business in the UK

From Accenture:

January 12, 2015

Zurich Insurance PLC Deploys Accenture Duck Creek Policy for Core Processing of Multiple Lines of Business in the UK

New software supports seven property and casualty lines of business, increasing speed of product development and deployment

NEW YORK; Jan. 12, 2015 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) announced that Accenture Duck Creek Policy is now in production at global insurer Zurich, supporting its general insurance business in the United Kingdom. The new system will enable Zurich to streamline processes and deploy insurance products faster, assisting the insurer’s efforts to more efficiently manage its business as it continues to expand its offering within the small and medium enterprise (SME) insurance marketplace. Duck Creek Policy is powering ZTrade, a new trading platform that delivers new products, pricing and self-service all from one place. Details about Zurich’s ZTrade platform can be viewed at http://www.tradeupwithztrade.co.uk/about-ztrade.php.

Accenture Duck Creek Policy supports the complete policy lifecycle for seven of Zurich’s lines of business with additional lines to be added over the coming months. Implementation of the software was managed by Syntel, a strategic delivery partner for Accenture Duck Creek software.

“We needed a system that would help us differentiate our insurance proposition in the market and Accenture Duck Creek had the best product definition and rating engine,” Adam Warwick, Director Business Change and IT at Zurich UK General Insurance. “With this software, we have used the ability to configure the platform to deliver unique features of our own design, which is a significant benefit and will help us to continue to provide better customer service as we grow our SME business.”

“Zurich is focused on expanding its presence and our software offers the flexibility and scalability to meet their business demands now and in the future,” said Michael A. Jackowski, global managing director of Accenture Duck Creek. “It is designed to provide the rapid response needed to develop and deploy products and to define workflows that will improve operational efficiency and the sales distribution channel.”

Accenture Duck Creek Policy is one of the core components in the suite of software that also includes rating, billing, and claims solutions. Each component can be implemented independently or combined for an integrated approach to manage all aspects of the P&C insurance lifecycle.

About Zurich
Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets. With more than 55,000 employees, it provides a wide range of general insurance and life insurance products and services. Zurich’s customers include individuals, small businesses, and mid-sized and large companies, including multinational corporations, in more than 170 countries. The Group is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1872. The holding company, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd (ZURN), is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and has a level I American Depositary Receipt (ZURVY) program, which is traded over-the-counter on OTCQX. Further information about Zurich is available at www.zurich.com.

*Zurich’s UK Life business is operated primarily through two entities: Zurich Assurance Ltd and Sterling ISA Managers Ltd. Zurich Assurance Ltd is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Sterling ISA Managers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 319,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

Accenture Duck Creek is a software suite offering comprehensive, full-featured property & casualty insurance software and SaaS solutions. Its configurable solutions are designed to work as a full end-to-end suite or as individual standalone components that adapt quickly and seamlessly to handle the unique needs of insurers of all sizes. Duck Creek software enables carriers to make better decisions in a real-time environment, streamline operations and improve their level of customer service. For more information, visitwww.accenture.com/duckcreek.

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Oracle Press Release

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Transforms Talent Management Processes with Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud

Leading Health Science Educator Improves Controls and Cuts Compensation Approval Time by 50 Percent with Oracle Talent Management Cloud

Redwood Shores, Calif. – January 7, 2015

News Summary

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) educates more healthcare professionals than any other health-related institution in Texas. With a growing network of clinical and teaching hospitals, UTHealth needed to supplement its core human resources system with solutions to improve talent management and reduce manual processes. The institution implemented Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud to provide an easy-to-use system for employees, school administrators, the human resources department, and IT.

News Facts

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), the most comprehensive academic health science center in the UT system and home to schools of biomedical informatics, biomedical sciences, dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health, implemented Oracle Talent Management Cloud, part of Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, to help manage talent and compensation in conjunction with its core human resources system, Oracle’s PeopleSoft HCM.

UTHealth needed to automate its manual merit recommendation and approval processes to make better use of the compensation team’s time, accelerate the approval process for workforce compensation, improve controls and visibility, and reduce manual processes, thereby saving time that could be directed to more strategic initiatives.

The compensation team previously needed to reconcile approximately 100 spreadsheets to confirm employee eligibility for salary increases, and data entry typically took at least one month. To address these challenges, UTHealth implemented Oracle Talent Management Cloud, Oracle Compensation Cloud, and Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence. By using Oracle Talent Management Cloud for compensation, the team now can complete a compensation review cycle in as few as two weeks.

In addition to reducing compensation approval cycle time, the Oracle HCM Cloud solutions enabled UTHealth to give school administrators higher levels of transparency into merit recommendations, which enabled them to make more informed compensation decisions.

UTHealth plans to expand its use of Oracle Compensation Cloud for incentive plan management and implement Oracle Learn Cloud to help provide learning and development programs for its 5,000 employees.

UTHealth worked with KBACE Technologies, a Platinum level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, to implement Oracle HCM Cloud.

Supporting Quotes

“Our data entry team had to manually key in approximately 4,000 salary increase transactions into our existing Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications—with the entire process taking at least a month,” said Krishna Kadiyala, director, employee services and HR technology, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “Using Oracle HCM Cloud we are now able to automatically populate salary increase information into PeopleSoft HCM, thereby drastically cutting our manual processes, and improving the system for the entire organization, from senior administrators to our data entry team.”

“We are committed to helping organizations such as UTHealth improve its processes so it can focus on its main goal of education,” said Cole Clark, global vice president of education and research, Oracle. “We look forward to continuing to work with UTHealth in its move to the cloud, creating a comprehensive talent management solution.”

Supporting Resources

Oracle in Higher Education

Oracle HCM

Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud

Oracle Talent Management Cloud

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence for Oracle Talent Management Cloud

Oracle Higher Education on Facebook

Oracle Higher Education on Twitter

Oracle Higher Education on LinkedIn

Oracle Higher Education on YouTube

Oracle Higher Education on Diigo

Oracle HCM on Facebook

Oracle HCM on Twitter

Modern HR in the Cloud Blog

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center.  For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

# # #

Synopsys to Acquire SpringSoft

News release:

Synopsys to Acquire SpringSoft

Acquisition Will Complement Synopsys' Technology Portfolio and Help Accelerate Delivery of SoC Debug and Custom Implementation Tools to Customers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:SNPS), a world leader in software and IP used in the design, verification and manufacture of electronic components and systems, through its Taiwan subsidiary, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SpringSoft (TAIEX:2473), a global supplier of specialized IC design software headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan. The SpringSoft acquisition supports Synopsys' strategy to quickly and effectively deliver the advanced capabilities that will help semiconductor customers solve their toughest design challenges, including verification and custom implementation.
Under the terms of the agreement, Synopsys Taiwan will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of SpringSoft for NT$57.00 (approximately US$1.90) per SpringSoft share in cash and acquire any remaining shares pursuant to a follow-on merger. The gross transaction value will be approximately US$406 million (NT$12.2 billion), or approximately US$305 million (NT$9.2 billion) net of cash acquired. The transaction, which is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal 2013, is subject to the minimum tender of 51 percent of the current outstanding SpringSoft shares, the approval of the follow-on merger by SpringSoft shareholders, regulatory approvals in Taiwan, and other customary closing conditions.
After the closing, SpringSoft will become part of Synopsys and SpringSoft stock will cease trading. When completed, Synopsys anticipates the transaction to be slightly accretive to fiscal 2013 non-GAAP earnings per share.
Verification requirements have exploded as designs have become increasingly complex, and debugging is the most time-consuming part of verification, taking up nearly half of the design cycle. At the same time, custom implementation tools have not kept up with the dramatic improvements seen in digital design. The combination of SpringSoft's and Synopsys' industry-leading verification technology portfolios will help accelerate delivery of a unified, powerful system-on-chip (SoC) debug environment so customers can continue to meet the demands of today's complex electronic designs. In addition, by integrating the physical design technology and teams from SpringSoft, Ciranova and Magma, Synopsys can accelerate innovation and offer a higher level of automation in custom implementation tools.
"This acquisition will increase Synopsys' investment in Taiwan by growing our local engineering expertise, technology development capabilities and customer support," said Chi-Foon Chan, president and co-CEO at Synopsys. "Combining SpringSoft's team and platform with Synopsys' complementary technology will help Synopsys lead further innovations in debug to more rapidly address the growing verification challenge. Simultaneously, SpringSoft's innovative custom implementation solution and its strong presence in leading Asian, European and U.S. semiconductor companies will help accelerate Synopsys' delivery of automation and innovation to an area of IC design that has been stagnant in the past."
About Synopsys
Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:SNPS) is a world leader in electronic design automation (EDA), supplying the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property (IP) and services used in semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing. Synopsys' comprehensive, integrated portfolio of implementation, verification, IP, manufacturing and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions helps address the key challenges designers and manufacturers face today, such as power and yield management, system-to-silicon verification and time-to-results. These technology-leading solutions help give Synopsys customers a competitive edge in bringing the best products to market quickly while reducing costs and schedule risk. Synopsys is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has approximately 70 offices located throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Visit Synopsys online at www.synopsys.com.

Accenture to Expand Clinical and Regulatory Information Management Services and Software Capabilities with Agreement to Acquire Octagon Research Solutions

Press release:

August 02, 2012

Accenture to Expand Clinical and Regulatory Information Management Services and Software Capabilities with Agreement to Acquire Octagon Research Solutions 

Accenture positioned to provide full service BPO regulatory services for the pharmaceutical industry

 

NEW YORK; Aug. 2, 2012 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire Octagon Research Solutions, Inc., a provider of clinical and regulatory information management solutions and software for the pharmaceutical industry. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

 

The acquisition will enhance Accenture's ability to help its pharmaceutical clients achieve more efficient global regulatory submissions that will enable them to get medicines to market more quickly, safely and at a lower cost.   Accenture's capabilities will be expanded to include comprehensive clinical and regulatory services - from clinical data collection to regulatory submissions management.  Accenture also will extend its business process outsourcing (BPO) services portfolio targeting the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Octagon's 380-member staff has deep experience in clinical data services and regulatory submissions, with 400 original applications completed, and the company is the fifth largest user of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) electronic submission gateway.  Octagon is a recognized provider for the FDA in establishing clinical data conversion and training standards and has deep knowledge of regulatory affairs combined with well established relationships developed by partnering with regulatory authorities.  Octagon will be fully integrated into Accenture's Life Sciences industry group.

 

"We believe that the timing is perfect for this acquisition as our clients are increasingly under pressure to reduce the drug development and approval timelines to get products to market more quickly, safely and cost effectively," said David Boath, North American managing director for Accenture's Life Sciences industry group.  "Our clients have an urgent need to focus resources on the scientific breakthroughs and also to improve the efficiency of their clinical and regulatory operations. Octagon's capabilities and experience will enable Accenture to provide comprehensive services spanning regulatory operations, submissions management, clinical data conversion and clinical data management.  The acquisition will enable Accenture to offer what we view as the industry's first comprehensive regulatory services solution with a global footprint."

 

According to James C. Walker, Octagon's chairman and CEO, "Octagon and Accenture will bring together a powerful combination of industry expertise and global capabilities that will help pharmaceutical companies achieve sustainable drug development models and get products to market more quickly and at lower cost. Octagon has completed tens of thousands of regulatory submissions in countries around the world.  The acquisition will strengthen our longstanding commitment to the pharmaceutical industry and provide clients with a comprehensive, global regulatory service that will deliver tangible business value."

 

Octagon is headquartered in Wayne, Pa., and maintains additional U.S. and international operations in Mountain View, Calif.; London; and Bangalore, India.  

 

The acquisition is subject to closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals, and is expected to close within 60 days.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 249,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.  Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world's most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.  The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011.  Its home page is www.accenture.com.

 

About Octagon Research Solutions, Inc.

Octagon Research Solutions is the world leader in clinical and regulatory information management solutions to the life sciences industry. Through an integrated suite of outsourced services, strategic consulting, and innovative technology, Octagon optimizes the entire drug development lifecycle - from clinical data collection to regulatory submission. Founded in 1999, Octagon has served over 350 clients on three continents, including global pharmaceutical brand leaders and emerging start-ups. The company is headquartered in Wayne, PA, and maintains additional U.S. and international operations in Mountain View, CA, London, United Kingdom, and Bangalore, India.

Press release:

CUSTOMER WIN: State of Connecticut to Consolidate IT Operations with BMC Software, Saves Taxpayer Dollars

Solution enables increased government efficiency

NEW YORK CITY, August 1, 2012 – With rampant budget deficits impacting all manner of public services, state governments are under enormous pressure to get the most value from taxpayer money. Every dollar counts.

The State of Connecticut has made those dollars stretch even further. A recent gubernatorial initiative to eliminate redundant tech support systems and create a powerful consolidated network will help the state achieve new levels of internal efficiencies and cost savings. After a rigorous review that included ServiceNow, CA and HP, Connecticut concluded that BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) was the best choice.

Len Smith, director of enterprise planning and architecture within Connecticut’s Department of Administrative Service’s Bureau of Enterprise Systems and Technology (DAS/BEST), identified several state agencies that were actively evaluating service management solutions in the marketplace. Smith recognized this as an opportunity to provide a single, statewide solution. The state agency concluded that the BMC FootPrints solution would help these agencies avoid creating a costly and inefficient decentralized IT service management model.

The Challenge

“State agencies were using independent service desk solutions, which made it difficult to streamline processes and implement best practices across agencies,” said Smith. “Our goal is to implement an integrated, centralized solution capable of delivering more effective and efficient IT services throughout the state.”

The Solution

To achieve this goal, Connecticut selected BMC Software to implement a single IT service management solution for state agencies.

Benefits

“With BMC, the state’s IT leadership will be able to identify trends and proactively address potential issues,” said Smith. “This approach has already saved our taxpayers more than $650,000 in costs that the state would have incurred if the various agencies continued to deploy their individual service management solutions.”

Using the unique workspace capabilities in the BMC FootPrints solution, BMC will deliver dedicated, self-contained service management environments to each of the participating agencies from one central location. As a result, Connecticut is saving valuable taxpayer dollars with automated workflows and streamlined statewide technology asset management.

“Complex and budget-conscious organizations such as the state of Connecticut rely on consolidated and standardized solutions to drive efficiencies and improve visibility into taxpayer-owned and operated IT systems,” said Dave Hansen, BMC’s vice president and general manager. “BMC is helping states like Connecticut cope with budget deficits by decreasing spending while increasing productivity and improving end-user satisfaction.”

For more information about BMC and the FootPrints solution, please visit:

• BMC FootPrints Community
• Follow @BMC_FootPrints on Twitter
• Follow @bmcsoftwareon Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. That's why more than 20,000 IT organizations – from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses – in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industry’s broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended June 30, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS: College of Marin Gets Even Smarter with BMC Software

BMC provides single pane of glass for managing IT environment

SAN FRANCISCO, July 30, 2012 – California community colleges have been hit hard with budget cuts, most recently facing a $149 million cut in February 2012. With limited IT resources, the College of Marin needed to find a way to cost-effectively manage the technology needs of more than 10,000 students.

The Challenge

Budget cuts left the College of Marin with one option: Reduce IT expenses and increase efficiencies without having a negative impact on students and faculty. With departmental budgets under constant scrutiny, the IT team needed a solution that would offer visibility into how to allocate IT resources, while providing the highest level of service to the college‘s community.

“We were in desperate need of a technology solution that would provide a holistic view of our IT environment – from tracking software licenses to eliminating redundancies,” said Maryann Kaehler, system support administrator for College of Marin.

The Solution

The College of Marin chose the BMC Track-It! solution from BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) based on functionality and price compared with competitive offerings. The solution has been deployed across all labs and classrooms as a way to track and manage all of the college’s IT assets.

“Thanks to BMC Software, our inventory model is now perfect,” said Kaehler. “Every dollar has been well-spent and the solution just keeps getting better.”

Benefits

As a result of the BMC implementation, the College of Marin has been able to increase efficiencies and visibility into its IT environment despite system-wide budget cuts. The college can now explore more ways to streamline efforts as time goes on such as managing and monitoring work orders from anywhere.

Kaehler added, “The ability to easily retire assets and re-allocate software licenses is absolutely wonderful. Finally we can keep historical records to ensure better asset control, compliance and reporting. We are getting our money’s worth. And best of all, we don’t have to use a spreadsheet anymore!”

For more information on the college’s implementation and the BMC Track-It! solution, please visit:

• Read the full case study here
• Access the BMC Track-It! Customer Community
• Follow @BMC_TrackIt  on Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. That's why more than 20,000 IT organizations – from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses – in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industry’s broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

SAP to Extend Country Road Map, Offer Solution Development Kit for SAP Business ByDesign Solution

Press release:

SAP to Extend Country Road Map, Offer Solution Development Kit for SAP Business ByDesign Solution

SAP NEWSBYTE - July 26, 2012 | SAP - Cloud Computing

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the second 2012 release of the SAP Business ByDesign solution. The cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is moving to a quarterly release cycle and is scheduled for availability in four additional countries: Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. The announcement follows the news of the company's largest SAP Business ByDesign customer win to date with the New South Wales Department of Trade & Investment in Australia.

Additionally, a software development kit (SDK) for SAP Business ByDesign will enable partners and customers to extend solution functionality and build one-off cases for customer-specific requirements. As part of the kit, SAP will provide developers with various capabilities, including Web services, which will allow the newly created partner add-on to exchange information with existing SAP or third-party cloud applications. Reusable building blocks — so called templates — will enable partners to create customer-specific add-ons much faster. Improved usability, including advanced documentation and examples, will help partners understand and start working with the SDK instantly — reducing the need for extensive training. More than 20 partners have already signed the contract, which enables them to begin working with the SDK.

To address increased customer and partner interest in creating country-specific content, SAP will also provide a localization kit to help them fulfill specific local requirements. Some customers have already started to use the kit to build additional country versions for their subsidiaries.

Co-innovation with customers and partners is a key part of the design process of cloud solutions from SAP. To help facilitate this approach, SAP installed an idea forum a year and a half ago for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with a global forum in English following about six month later. The forum serves as an easy-to-use and highly impactful tool for customers and partners to provide requests and ideas for additional functionality. Out of a total of 1,400 entries, SAP has realized 800 and plans to make more available with the new version of SAP Business ByDesign, including:

• Additional services, manufacturing and distribution functionality: Service industry enhancements, including improved ability to combine both products and services on projects, which links material in sales orders to project tasks. Through this extended functionality, SAP Business ByDesign is planned to support service industries outside of the professional service core. The extended ability to sell service contracts supporting billing, service level agreements, execution and escalations are intended to provide greater support for managed services agreements common in IT, media, marketing and other consulting services. Planned enhancements for manufacturing and distribution include support for customers that manage and track onsite and in-house repair scenarios.
• Mobile extensibility: SAP intends to enable key users able to customize the view for processes within SAP Business ByDesign on their preferred mobile devices. This will extend the existing standard support for over 15 mobile scenarios, including time and expense, customer relationship management (CRM) and reporting.

To learn more, visit the Cloud Computing page on sap.com and the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Press release:

Parallels Partners See Growth of 47% in Sales of Microsoft Hosted Exchange Seats

July 26, 2012

Hosting and cloud services enablement leader previews Parallels Automation 
for Microsoft’s new technologies for high-density websites and virtual machine hosting

RENTON, Wash. – July 26, 2012 – Parallels® (www.parallels.com), a hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced its partners have grown their Microsoft Hosted Exchange seats by 47 percent year-over-year, demonstrating that service providers can get to the cloud and grow with Parallels combination of software, ecosystem and expertise. Parallels Automation is now enabling the delivery of Microsoft-hosted applications and other services for hundreds of service providers worldwide, including AppRiver, BlackNight, Charter Communications, Cobweb, Dualtec/Nomer, Insight, KT, KPN, LuxCloud, Outsourcery,Portugal Telecom (PT), SKB Kontur, SoftCom, STAR, TDC, TMNet, UOL Diveo and UPC.

“The ongoing growth in hosted business e-mail services based on Microsoft Exchange Server demonstrates why Parallels and its partners are important as Microsoft continues to build its network of hosting providers and reselling partners,” said Sara Radicati, CEO of The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm. The firm’s report on “Hosted Email Market, 2011-2015” forecasts that worldwide revenues from basic mailboxes in the hosted business e-mail segment is expected to grow to nearly $3.6 billion by year-end 2015, representing an average annual growth rate of 17 percent since 2011.

At Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, Parallels also presented the first public demo of Parallels Automation forWindows Server 2012. This demo integrated the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft’s new-high density web site and virtual machine hosting technologies for hosting service providers.  By taking advantage of the Application Packaging Standard, Parallels was able to quickly integrate the recently released CTP.  The demo illustrated how these easy-to-deploy technologies will allow hosting service providers to reduce costs associated with onboarding and servicing customers, while increasing resource utilization and driving up operating margins.

“Choosing the right partners to move to the cloud is a critical decision,” said Microsoft Executive Jon Roskill. “Parallels continues to demonstrate why they are a smart choice for service providers who are seeking to quickly deploy and deliver the entire suite of Microsoft hosted applications.”

“Parallels delivers value to service providers who want to launch Microsoft applications in a syndicated or hosted environment,” said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels.  “From early support for the latest technologies such as Windows Server 2012, to the success of Parallels Automation for delivering a vast portfolio of Microsoft cloud and hosted applications, Parallels has become the partner of choice for the world’s leading service providers and hosters.”

Parallels service provider software portfolio includes a rich set of capabilities, including the latest version of Parallels Automation 5.4, which was released on June 4.  Parallels Automation 5.4 delivers hundreds of applications, including hosted Microsoft Lync services, that appeal to SMBs seeking to utilize cloud-based messaging, collaboration and unified communications across desktops, laptops and mobile devices. Microsoft Lync also includes built-in web and call conferencing support and is a natural upsell to those SMBs already utilizing Microsoft Exchange.  Parallels Automation 5.4 provides billing automation and provisioning of Microsoft Lync and other Microsoft services, while enabling integration of third-party hosted applications from leading ISVs.

Parallels is a Microsoft Global ISV and Gold Certified Partner, with a focus on making it easy for service providers to meet the needs of small and medium businesses by delivering a wide selection of Microsoft hosted applications. Building on its long-term relationship with Microsoft, Parallels entire service provider software portfolio provides a wide range of resale possibilities and accelerated time to market for Microsoft products. 

Parallels software provides delivery capabilities using the Application Packaging Standard (APS), a "pluggable" approach to enabling hosted and cloud applications and services. APS benefits ISVs by providing a sales channel through the more than 9,000 Parallels service providers and resellers who serve more than 10 million small and medium businesses (SMBs). In turn, hosters and other cloud service providers have access to the growing variety of APS-certified applications and services that are easy to deploy and maintain.  The full suite of Microsoft’s APS-enabled hosted applications include Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Windows Server and Windows Server Hyper-V, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft CRM. For the smaller and growing hoster or web designer, the new version of Parallels Plesk Panel 11, the preferred choice for hosting service providers, web designers, and website owners, also provides support for Microsoft WebMatrix, Windows Shared Hosting and more.

About Parallels

Parallels is a worldwide leader in hosting and cloud service enablement and desktop virtualization. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with more than 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Press release:

BMC Software Delivers ‘Chart and Compass’ to Help IT Map the User Experience in the Cloud

• HealthMEDX Understands and Resolves End-User Pain
• Wayfair Builds Competitive Advantage with Customers

HOUSTON, July 25, 2012 – A poor user experience can kill businesses running customer-facing applications in the cloud. To complicate matters even more, typical user feedback such as “the application is running too slow” is not often specific enough to pinpoint and fix the problems before the business is impacted.

To help IT organizations deliver what end users want, BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) has created a “chart and compass” to quickly map and navigate the end-user experience. BMC End User Experience Management is a powerful solution that helps IT organizations rapidly diagnose and improve customer satisfaction rates. In the latest release, BMC has extended this powerful solution to include applications running in the cloud, with visibility from the end user all the way back to the code.

“End-user experience monitoring is a critical criterion of the interaction between the human, device, and customer facing software applications,” said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner. “While this criterion is only one part of a complete application performance monitoring strategy, this one criterion will have an ever increasing role in which applications are successfully deployed and sticky – particularly in the cloud.”

Customers like HealthMEDX and Wayfair know the value of BMC’s “chart and compass” well.

Finding the needle in the haystack – “We wanted to stop the finger pointing,” explained Chris Bingham, vice president of infrastructure at HealthMEDX, a US-based software vendor for long-term care, home care and therapy organizations. According to Bingham, HealthMEDX has between 7,000 and 12,000 concurrent users per second accessing its applications.

According to Bingham, diagnosing end user experience issues was a source of constant frustration as it took too many cycles to figure out the real issues. Within hours of implementing the BMC End User Experience Management solution, however, he had access to data points such as end-to-end latency and network latency that helped to draw the line from the individual user experience to the issue. HeathMEDX can now trace performance issues all the way from the user to the code, and they can do it quickly.

“The BMC solution has really increased the pace at which we identify problems,” said Steve Conine, CTO and co-founder, Wayfair, the largest online retailer of home furnishings. “We don’t want customer service calling us up, walking over and telling us something is down. We want to know it is down before they call us.”

Building competitive advantage – Having the best user experience is a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and BMC is helping customers to differentiate themselves in this space.

For Bingham and HealthMEDX, what started as an effort to more quickly address end- user problems has blossomed into a proactive approach to incorporating the end user experience into every aspect of the HealthMEDX Vision solution lifecycle. They now use end-user data to influence new releases of their software.

“This proactive approach has made our credibility with our customers go through the roof,” said Bingham.

“Today, the BMC End User Experience Management solution is on the main screens in our IT rooms and it’s one of the things that everyone looks at. If we have completed a recent code push, we know to keep our eyes on that screen for potential issues,” said Conine. Wayfair hosts more than 2.5 million visitors per week and has completed nearly 10 million orders since 2002.

Defining user experience in the cloud – The agility and cost effective benefits of delivering applications, particularly customer-facing web applications, via the cloud have increased exponentially. Yet a high quality experience for the end user remains the life-blood of cloud applications, and is essential to success. Currently most related solutions look first at the complex application back-end rather than starting with the end user, increasing the time to find and resolve end-user problems.

“The idea that we could have a holistic view into our end user experience previously seemed mythical to me,” said Bingham. “As we are moving our business into a hybrid cloud model, I believe my imagination is the only limitation as to how we can utilize the data from the BMC solution to improve our business. It is one of the best IT decisions I have ever made.”

“Delivering mission critical services across cloud based offerings brings unique management challenges,” said Kia Behnia, BMC’s chief technology officer. “Providing visibility into how cloud services are being experienced by end users provides the map to delivering reliable and differentiated services for customers.”

For more information about BMC and the BMC End User Experience Management solution, please visit:

• BMC End User Experience Management
• Wayfair video
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Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

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Press release:

Oracle Press Release

Oracle Announces Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0

Engineered System Optimized for Running Business Applications; Delivers Groundbreaking Innovations to Help Customers Reduce Cost and Complexity, Eliminate Business Risk and Seize New Market Opportunities

Redwood Shores, Calif. – July 25, 2012

News Facts

Oracle today announced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0.

Customers in 43 countries across 22 industries have already adopted Oracle Exalogic. Exalogic is the fastest growing Oracle engineered system with 3x Y/Y sales bookings based on the last two quarters of FY 2012. To date, 40% of Oracle Exalogic’s growth comes from customers who have chosen Exalogic over competing solutions from IBM, including mainframes.

The Oracle Exalogic engineered system outperforms competing platforms by a wide margin:

Eliminates application and middleware deployment risk with one-click automated deployment of complex, multi-tier business applications.

Up to 10x performance gains for Oracle Applications, Java-based applications and other business applications

Up to 6x faster application provisioning to help customers quickly respond to changing market needs.

Built on open, industry standard technologies, Oracle Exalogic:

Supports virtualization of mission-critical business applications with near native performance vs. physical servers through Oracle VM integration.

Provides a high-speed communication (I/O) fabric, Oracle Exabus, which is the foundation of Oracle Exalogic’s extreme performance, reliability and scalability and ties all Oracle Exalogic system components together.

Delivers true elasticity at the application level through integrated application-to-disk management with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

Supports consolidation of multiple applications on the same system as a private cloud, while eliminating security risks through complete application isolation.

Integrates Oracle Traffic Director, a built-in Application Delivery Controller, to securely manage and route large volumes of application traffic with high performance.

Oracle Exalogic provides customers and partners with an engineered system that accelerates the performance and can protect and maximize return on their existing and future Oracle software investments.

Oracle Exalogic is the logical choice for running Oracle Applications, including the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Oracle’s JD Edwards,Oracle ATG Commerce and Oracle’s industry specific business applications. These applications have been optimized, tested, benchmarked and certified on Oracle Exalogic for extreme performance.

Oracle Exalogic is optimized to run the standards-based Oracle Fusion Middleware product portfolio, including the market-leading Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Tuxedo products. Oracle Tuxedo ART 12c is optimized on Oracle Exalogic to help customers reduce IT costs with rapid rehosting of IBM CICS, IMS, and batch applications.

Oracle Exalogic natively leverages Oracle Exadata Database Machine and integrates withOracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters.

The new Oracle Platinum Services program is a special support entitlement, including an industry-leading 5-minute fault notification service level agreement, available at no additional cost to Oracle Premier Support customers that are running certified configurations on Oracle engineered systems.

Oracle Exastack Program

340 ISVs are certified on Oracle Exalogic through the Oracle Exastack Program, which enables ISVs and other qualifying members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to optimize their applications to run even faster and more reliably on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

ISVs are seeing dramatic out-of-the-box performance improvement for virtually every standard Oracle Linux or Oracle Solaris application.

Supporting Quotes

“Since the general availability of Oracle Exalogic in January 2011, customers are experiencing tremendous improvements in application performance and vast reductions in the complexity of their application infrastructures, while improving their time-to-market of revenue generating services,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java Products, Oracle. “Built on open, industry standards, Oracle Exalogic can support consolidation of hundreds of Java and non-Java applications and delivers lower total cost of ownership by supporting more transactions on less hardware and software with ease of management.”

“As the largest retailer of sporting goods in Latin America, we are achieving very aggressive growth - over 100% per year. Running our Oracle ATG Commerce application on our previous JBoss infrastructure we had 30-40 different machines with 120 instances. We were able to migrate to Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud in less than 3 weeks, without any downtime and have already seen impressive results,” said Márcio Kumruian, CEO, Netshoes. “With Oracle Exalogic, we have consolidated to 1 server with only 16 instances, providing both cost savings and increased business efficiency. Our Oracle ATG Commerce application performs 6x greater than before and is fully synchronized with Oracle WebLogic Server. The Netshoes brand means quality and value for our customers and we want their online experience to be excellent. With Oracle Exalogic all the pieces work together, so we can focus on customer service and expanding our business.”

“Business critical applications require performance, elastic scalability and high availability, at an affordable cost,” said Massimo Pezzini, vice president and research fellow at Gartner. “To maximize flexibility and minimize costs, user organizations are increasingly looking for  a range of cloud-based options including open standard-based integrated system platforms providing virtualization, multi-tenancy, advanced automation and facilitated operations as well as compatibility with public cloud environments.”

Supporting Resources

Photos: Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0 Screenshots

Webcast Series: Rethink Your Business Application Deployment Strategy

Webcast: Oracle Solutions Maximize the Value of the Smart Grid Data Explosion

Webcast: Optimize Your Retail Operations with Oracle Engineered Systems

Oracle’s Cloud Application Foundation

Oracle VM

Connect with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud on Blog, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube

What Oracle Partners are Saying about the Oracle Exastack Program

Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN)

Oracle Exastack Program

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.