XO Announces Partnership With RingCentral
Redwood City, California - August 21, 2008 - Web host, Internet and telecommunications services company, XO Communications’ Concentric, has partnered with RingCentral, to provide enterprise-class hosted applications.
Solutions will include Web site hosting, business email, Microsoft Hosted Exchange, corporate domain management and perimeter email protection. Concentric customers will have access to RingCentral’s hosted business phone system and Internet fax to streamline and enhance their business communications.
Barbara Branaman, Executive Vice President of product and marketing for Concentric explained, ”’Small to medium businesses need streamlined communications solutions that are affordable and do not require the purchase of complex technology. The RingCentral hosted business phone system compliments a small business’s voice services by providing a centralized phone and Internet fax solution for mobile and distributed employees. With RingCentral, we now offer a comprehensive suite of affordable small business services including everything a small business needs to create a big business presence on the web and on the phone.”
RingCentral’s hosted services help people connect to businesses and mobile professionals worldwide. Delivering the power of a sophisticated phone system without expensive hardware to buy or maintain, RingCentral takes the high cost and hassle out of communications proving you don’t need a ”big company” budget to look like a big company. RingCentral combines a toll-free or local number with advanced call management, PBX, voicemail and Internet fax, enabling customers to set up multiple extensions with voicemail, automatically screen, forward and place calls, allow their customers to click-to-call directly from the website, view call logs for sales leads, send and receive faxes, and receive message alerts.
Vlad Shmunis, President and CEO of RingCentral noted, ”Growing businesses rely on Concentric web hosting and messaging services to reach their customers effectively and project an established, professional image. The RingCentral hosted business phone system is a perfect fit with these services enabling businesses to extend their professional image and brand through the most critical communication channel, their phone. We are thrilled to partner with Concentric, a recognized leader in business IT infrastructure.”
The new service is available August 11, 2008. For a limited time, existing Concentric customers will receive the first 30 days free when signing up for the RingCentral service through a link in the Concentric Customer Gateway.
Ron Heradian, Chief Systems Architect for long-time Concentric customer, Global System Services Corporation offered, ”We were really pleased to find RingCentral through Concentric. RingCentral streamlines our messaging platform for global communications. By utilizing this service, we have consolidated our phone services, resulting in better service for our customers at a lower total cost. Now, we have a solid business communications capability that enhances our highly mobile business model.”
RingCentral provides an award-winning hosted business phone system for small business. With top industry honors, including PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award and Small Business Computing’s Excellence in Technology, RingCentral offers full-access to core small business phone services and helps improve productivity for tens of thousands of customers worldwide. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, RingCentral is privately held with backing from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and DAG Ventures.
Concentric, founded in 1997, is a business unit of XO Communications Services, Inc. Concentric provides enterprise-class hosted applications including web site hosting, business email, corporate domain management and perimeter email protection. Leveraging its patented Clustered Hosting Architecture, Concentric delivers superior performance, reliability, and security. Concentric accounts are backed by a three month Satisfaction Guarantee and 24×7 U.S.-based telephone technical support.
XO Communications, a subsidiary of XO Holdings, Inc., is a provider of national and local telecommunications services to businesses, large enterprises and communications service providers. XO offers a portfolio of services, including local and long distance voice, dedicated Internet access, private networking, data transport, and web hosting services, as well as bundled voice and Internet solutions. XO provides these services over an advanced, nationwide facilities-based IP network and serves 75 metropolitan markets across the United States.
To learn more about RingCentral services, please visit: www.ringcentral.com/concentric/rco.
For more information about Concentric, please visit: www.concentric.com.
To learn more information about XO, please visit: www.xo.com.
Atitude Digital Media Selects The Planet
Houston, Texas - August 18, 2008 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has been selected by Brazil’s Atitude Digital Media, to manage its mission-critical IT infrastructure.
Helder Conde, Chief Technology Officer of Atitude Digital Media noted. ”In our business, our Webcasts are live, with several hundred people online for each event. Nothing can go wrong with the level of clients we serve. Our reputation is earned every time we conduct a Webcast, so uptime, stability and security are critical to us.”
Based in Sao Paulo, the 20-year-old company provides webcasting services to some of the world’s largest companies, including Pfizer, Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Avon, as well as a number of medical societies.
In the past four years, the company has conducted more than 700 Webcasts with thousands of hours of live content to thousands of people in more than a dozen countries. A customer of The Planet since 2005, Atitude previously used dedicated hosting services for managing the company’s complex infrastructure.
Mr. Conde noted, ”We’ve grown rapidly, and we were looking for a company that provides all the services and technical expertise of Planet Northstar. Their Anticipation Advantage methodology helped determine exactly what we needed to create a top-notch infrastructure that could scale with our growth, and at a budget that was workable for us. We expanded our footprint to include additional servers, load balancers, firewalls, SAN storage, managed backup and database management. At Atitude, our core values include being responsive, trustworthy and committed to our customers, and I’m impressed our dedicated account team shares these values.”
Steve Kahan, Vice President of marketing and product management with The Planet added, ”Our development of the Anticipation Advantage enables customers to thoroughly plan their IT infrastructure beyond their needs just today. The methodology also provides key process indicators about when they need to begin scaling, which eliminates the worry and frustration many organizations experience in the face of rapid growth. Equally as important, the account team of highly skilled and seasoned experts is always available to customers so they have the confidence that a knowledgeable partner who knows their business is always available to help.”
In its 20-year history, Atitude has kept a keen eye on emerging market trends. The company was originally known for creating high-quality, computer-generated slides and transparencies for corporate presentations, as well as multimedia productions. Today, it is Brazil’s leading provider of Webcasting services, hosting on average more than one each day from three studios in its Sao Paulo offices.
Mr. Conde continued, ”In the last four years, the Internet has emerged as the best platform for communications, and our client base has moved rapidly for both internal and external audiences. Our clients require extensive training both for sales representatives and physicians, and they’ve found Atitude as the perfect solution to meet these needs.”
The company manages the entire event for clients. They work directly with presenters to host the event, sending notification and reminder e-mails to participants, generating reports on results, providing on-demand access afterwards, as well as maintaining extensive databases for each company. According to Conde, the presentations continue to add value for the companies since each one is typically viewed by at least four times the number of live Webcast participants.
Mr. Conde observed, ”In years past, these companies sponsored semi-annual meetings for their sales forces, but today as new studies emerge or competitive products are announced, it’s critical that they have new data immediately, so they rely on our services to meet that demand. At the same time, if one of these companies hosts physicians at an event anywhere in the world, they can Webcast with us from any venue, and we can support the requirement since our bandwidth connections are incredibly robust. With our capabilities, we make their lives much easier.”
The costs for hosting in the U.S. are five to six times lower than those in his native country. While bandwidth costs are slowly declining, ADSL is more common and far less efficient. In addition, because taxes on hardware are approximately 70 percent, hosting provides far better economic sense for his growing business.
Mr. Conde concluded, ”Making the decision to host overseas was difficult. As our international business grew, I knew it was the right direction for our company. We’ve seen other companies emerge in Brazil, and they appear to do a good job, until the participants begin to load. It’s there they fail. Our speed and reliability set us apart, which makes our offering highly competitive.”
Ultimately, The Planet’s goal is to provide:
- High levels of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
- Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
- Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
- Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
- Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business
The Planet hosts over 22,000 small and medium-size businesses and 7.7 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and advanced services backed by 24×7x365 support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division combines a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver a fully managed hosting solution. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses.
For more about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.
TheSMESpace Announces Launch Of New Facebook Service
London, United Kingdom - August 18, 2008 - Web hosting integration facilitator, TheSMESpace’s storage solution, has developed a public sharing file component, which integrates with Picnik, an inline image editing service.
The new Facebook component can also share Flickr, for easy image uploads. Ian Osborne, CEO, commented, ”We are committed to providing increased integration with other high value web application services so that our users can get the most from their data. We believe storage to be a commodity and that the true value of working data is what you can do with it, how you can access it, and how it integrates with others.”
Mr. Osborne added, ”We already provide our users the ability to use a rich web client, iGoogle, the iPhone or a light mobile client to access their data. We also provide email backup and business collaboration features that include business groups, revision control, firewall friendly file sharing, all of which we intend to augment over the next 3 months.
”Our Storage service is built on top of Amazon S3 and we will make an exciting announcement about new ways to access our service quite soon. We will also be announcing some exciting new collaboration integration to enable our users to do even more with their data.”
SMEStorage provides access to data using various channels such as a rich web client, iGoogle, IPhone, Mobile, Facebook and Joomla. It uses Amazon S3 as to store its data and provides new users with 250MB free. TheSMESpace provides online and mobile applications for businesses and individuals - TheSMESpace is your space for business.
To learn more, please visit: http://thesmespace.com.
Vectoral Announces Partnership With Netenberg
London, United Kingdom - August 14, 2008 - European dedicated server firm, Vectoral Servers, has partnered with Netenberg, to offer a one-click script auto-installer, Fantastico De Luxe.
Designed to enable web site owners to easily deploy and manage installations of dozens of business class w eb applications, with the partnership, Vectoral Servers will immediately implement Fantastico De Luxe on its entire cluster of cPanel-based dedicated servers. Clients will be able to access Fantastico De Luxe through cPanel and can use the software to easily install dozens of free applications, including content management systems, blogging platforms, customer support portals, discussion boards, photo galleries, among other services.
Ekin Ersoy, Sales Director, Vectoral Servers noted, ”Providing value-added features to our dedicated servers is important as we continue to improve our robust product line. Through this partnership with Netenberg, our clients are able to quickly and easily implement world-class Web applications and ultimately take their Web sites to the next level.”
Vectoral Servers will provide Fantastico De Luxe at no additional charge to its clients. The system will be automatically upgraded periodically to incorporate new scripts and provide the latest revisions to existing applications.
Dedicated servers from Vectoral Servers start at $29.95/monthly. The company offers a variety of hardware configurations, including both Intel and AMD-based chipsets. All servers are hosted in Vectoral Servers fully managed Frankfurt, Germany private data facility.
Vectoral Servers is a privately owned, independent company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1996, Vectoral has over a decade of experience in providing a unique mix of focused service and truly exceptional quality. A core goal for Vectoral is making dedicated server hosting an easy, uncomplicated process for each and every one of its clients.
To learn more about Vectoral Servers. please visit: www.vectoral.info
iWeb Group Releases Earnings Report
Quebec, Canada - August 14, 2008 - Internet hosting infrastructure provider, iWeb Group Inc., and subsidiary of iWeb Technologies, has released the financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2008, ending June 30, 2008.
Third quarter highlights include: - Revenue increased 57% to $4.1 million for the three months ended June 30, 2008, compared to $2.6 million for the same period in 2007;
- Adjusted EBITDA increased to $1.0 million for the third quarter of 2008, compared to $0.7 million for the same period in 2007;
- Infrastructure work has begun on the fourth and final phase of the Couture Data Center;
- An additional $2.7 million of annually recurring revenue generated in the third quarter.
Eric Chouinard, President and CEO of iWeb noted, ”’Revenues have continued to grow steadily in the last quarter. This progress confirms the effectiveness of recently implemented strategies to support our growth: the new web site, launched in March, improved management of advertising strategies, and a new operational structure in the Company’s sales department. Combined with our standard operations, these strategies are generating remarkable results. In the past three months, we have added $2.7 million in annual recurring revenue to our existing revenues, which bodes very well for the upcoming quarters.”
Revenues for the third quarter ended June 30, 2008 totalled $4.1 million, compared to $2.6 million for the same period of 2007, an increase of $1.5 million, or 57%.
The gross profit margin for the quarter was 49%, compared to 59% for the same period 12 months ago. The strength of the Canadian dollar compared to the U.S. dollar is the main reason for this decrease. The majority of iWeb’s cost of services sold is expensed in Canadian dollars, as opposed to revenues, which are perceived mostly in U.S. dollars. In addition, costs attributed to the co-location site on Nun’s Island, which was brought online on May 1, 2008, have affected the gross profit margin, given the modest revenues recorded thus far for this data center.
Operating expenses have increased, from 47% of revenues one year ago, to 49% of revenues for the third quarter. These additional operating expenses are the result of higher financing costs, due to increased debt facilities, this despite a decrease in sales expenses, the result of the improved management of advertising strategies.
Adjusted EBITDA increased to $1.0 million, or 23% or revenues for the third quarter ended June 30, 2008, compared to $0.7 million, or 27% of revenues for the three months ended June 30, 2007.
Net earnings for the quarter ended June 30, 2008 are close to break-even, at $13,210 or $0.0005 per share compared to $200,848 or $0.0085 per share for the corresponding period of 2007. This decrease in net earnings is the direct result of the lower gross profit margin.
Earlier this summer, iWeb attained ranking among Profit Magazine’s top 100 Canadian companies, based on revenue growth over the past 5 years. From 2002 to 2007, the company’s revenues have gone from 1.35 million to 9.82 million as of October 1st 2007, an increase of 627%; enough for iWeb to make its entry into the 100th position on the annual ranking.
The PROFIT 100 is the annual ranking which rates the top 100 Canadian companies based on the percentage of their revenue growth over a 5-year span. Produced by the business magazine PROFIT, 2008 marks the 20th edition of the ranking.
Founded in 1996, iWeb offers a full line of advanced IP hosting services either through shared hosting, dedicated servers or colocation in three data centers, featuring over 52,000 square feet of floor space and the latest technological equipment. iWeb provides services in English, French and Spanish to clients in more than 130 countries.
To learn more, please visit: www.iweb.com.
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