As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
Company: Dexrex Gear
Headquarters: Newton, Mass.
Technology Sector: Mobile
Key Product: Dexrex Gear ChatSync
Year Founded: 2005
Number of Channel Partners: 3 in the U.S., more partnerships to come
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Dexrex Gear's data management tool offers storage of text-based communications traffic, including IM, SMS and social media.
The Lowdown: Dexrex Gear is aiming to take advantage of two quickly growing markets: unified communications and compliance infrastructure. "Our initial focus is on the regulated markets. Instant messages (IMs) need to be treated more like e-mail. Companies should have policies of use and effective archival abilities to retrieve specific communications," said Dexrex CEO Derek Lyman. "We see this as something that should be standard and that will become a default: Customers should have a comprehensive data management suite. All [means of communication] should be captured, archived and processed into whatever platform the customer is using."
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| Dexrex Gear ChatSync |
Lyman and CTO Richard Tortora founded the company while the two were students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The two are committed to forging new channel partnerships in the coming months and do not sell the product directly.
"We're all about integrated solutions -- it's not about having our own stack of data," Lyman added. "We're very channel-oriented."
Company: ClearCenter
Headquarters: Orem, Utah
Technology Sector: Services
Key Products: ClearOS network server/gateway and ClearSDN (Service Delivery Network)
Year Founded: 2009
Number of Channel Partners: 200 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Providers
Why You Should Care: ClearCenter provides an open service delivery platform that partners can tailor to meet the IT needs of small business and distributed environments that is simple, secure and affordable.
The Lowdown: ClearCenter believes its technology can help businesses empty their racks.
The Orem, Utah-based company has developed an open-source services platform that solution providers can offer on a single box to replace a whole rack full of servers, according to Michael Proper, chairman and CEO of ClearCenter.
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| ClearOS |
ClearCenter also offers cloud-based services such as remote backup, dynamic DNS, dynamic VPN and remote monitoring and management through channel partners, Proper said.
"We're a platform for service providers. Some [partners] might say, 'I just want the OS. I want it on my hardware.' Others might say, 'I want it in these different locations, but I want to pay for remote backup for servers, multiple Internet connections that come in load balanced to Office A or Office B.' They may want to provide content filtration for their customers, provide limited access for certain users. Or they may want to provide intrusion detection. Some may like to manage the gateway layer," Proper said.
Because ClearCenter's offering touches on a number of different areas, the company competes against the likes of Untangle and IBM's Nitix offerings in some areas, while it fights Novell and Microsoft in some elements on the server side, Proper said.
"There are huge amounts of value that partners can provide and decrease costs for customers," Proper said.
Company: Canonical
Headquarters: London, U.K.
Technology Sector: Software
Key Product: Ubuntu Linux
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Channel Partners: 117, primarily in North America
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Canonical has brought Linux to the mass market by way of its partnerships with major OEMs and via word of mouth within the Ubuntu Server user community.
The Lowdown: Canonical, the London-based company that oversees commercial development of the Ubuntu open-source operating system, sees itself as an instrumental force in bringing Linux to the mass market and beyond the boundaries of the data center.
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| Ubuntu 9.10 |
"We saw that as a real opportunity for Ubuntu to break outside the traditional Linux area," said George. "Dell were certainly pioneers and took the first step in marketing Linux, and they did a lot of work to make sure Ubuntu works on their PCs."
Since then, Canonical has inked additional partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, and other OEMS.
In 2006, Linux had begun to reach a critical mass of industry acceptance on the server side, George said. "By that point, we discovered that Ubuntu Server was sufficiently well known among the Linux experts who'd been working with Ubuntu Desktop," he said.
Canonical works with a wide range of channel partners, including solution providers, consultants and integrators. According to George, Canonical's ideal partner is one whose primary business is building software solutions with customers and delivering them as managed solutions, and whose background includes experience in handling large integration projects.
"Our partners bring a massive amount of reach into local markets that we can't get to. We're a relatively small business, and they provide the services we cannot deliver to Ubuntu users," George said.
On October 26, Canonical released Ubuntu Desktop 9.10, which enables companies to build their own cloud computing environments on their own servers and hardware. As it has done with desktop and server Linux, Canonical aims to take a pioneering role in cloud computing, and this release is the first step in that direction, George said.
"There are lots of people who want to try out the cloud, but they can't do it on Amazon [Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2]. Our approach gives customers the advantages of a dynamic environment," he said.
Company: Jesubi
Headquarters: Indianapolis, Ind.
Technology Sector: Software
Key Product: Jesubi sales force automation software
Year Founded: 2006
Number of Channel Partners: 5 in the U.S.
Ideal Channel Partner: SMB-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Jesubi positions its eponymous sales force automation applications as more effective and easier to use than such competitors as Salesforce.com and Sage SalesLogix.
The Lowdown: Jesubi, which has been selling its sales force automation (SFA) software for almost two years and recently began offering a Web-based version of the application, tries to remedy the shortcomings of today's SFA technology.
SFA applications today, despite all their capabilities, are largely used for contact management and sales forecasting, argued Jesubi president Bill Johnson. Most, in fact, make sales representatives less productive with all their data-entry chores.
"First and foremost, we're easier to use," said Johnson. "I can train any sales rep to use Jesubi in less than an hour." His claim: Jesubi users with one click can do tasks that salesforce.com users may need a dozen clicks to accomplish.
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| Jesubi |
The product also includes what Jesubi calls a "prospecting velocity" capability that collects and analyzes sales-call data, providing users with such statistics as the number of attempts to contact a prospect, the number of conversations that occur and the time interval between calls. That gives sales managers more visibility into a company's sales process, Johnson said.
About 60 percent of Jesubi's customers use the company's software as their sole CRM system while the rest use it to augment other applications including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite or Salesforce.com, Johnson said. (The Jesubi name, by-the-way, comes from the first two letters of the first names of company's three founders: Bill Johnson is the "bi.")
Jesubi has just started to wade into the channel, enlisting a handful of solution providers that either sell and support the software or recommend Jesubi to their sales consulting services clients. Johnson sees opportunities for solution providers to develop best-practice services and sales analysis applications around Jesubi's programmatic selling technology.
Company: SpamTitan
Headquarters: Galway, Ireland
Technology Sector: Security
Key Product: SpamTitan AntiSpam
Year Founded: 2003
Number of Channel Partners: 105 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: SpamTitan offers comprehensive e-mail security, protecting against phishing attacks, viruses, malware and, yes, spam too.
The Lowdown: Hands down, one of the biggest headaches for businesses and organizations of any size is spam, which can clog networks, eat up bandwidth and lead to more serious problems such as phishing attacks and malware.
Which is why SpamTitan is about more than just spam, executives said. SpamTitan, offered as both an ISO software suite and as a virtual appliance, also focuses on viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other high level e-mail security threats. That is to say, the product addresses spam and all that comes with it.
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| SpamTitan for VMware |
"It allows us to get in front of people. It's very much a try-and-buy sales method," said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of SpamTitan. "If you make it easy for the customer, they'll try things."
SpamTitan, which primarily targets the SMB, along with K-12 education and other verticals, has seen strong growth, which will help enable the company to double its channel base over the next year, Kavanagh said.
Meanwhile, Kavanagh said that SpamTitan for VMware also positions the company well for the impending mass migration to virtualization as more customers transition from a physical IT environment to a virtual one.
"The rollout of virtualization in organizations these days is huge," he said. "That makes for easy trial and testing of virtual appliances, of which we are one. They can be up and running with our product within an hour. That in and of itself gives you an advantage over the competition."
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