Friday 31 July 2009

Extreme Networks Reports 5 Percent Sequential Revenue Growth

Extreme Networks today announced financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and year ended June 28, 2009. For the fourth quarter, net revenue was $81.3 million, above the prior range of $79-$81 million that the Company announced on July 17, 2009. This represents a sequential increase of 5 percent as compared to revenue of $77.2 million in the previous quarter and a 17 percent decrease as compared to revenue of $98.3 million in fourth quarter of last year.

Fourth quarter non-GAAP net income was $2.3 million or $0.03 per diluted share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $3.0 million or $0.03 per diluted share in the fourth quarter last year. Non-GAAP financial results exclude the impact of stock-based compensation and restructuring charges. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures is included in the accompanying financial tables.

For the fourth quarter, net revenue in North America was $34.9 million, revenue in EMEA was $31.6 million, and revenue in APAC was $14.8 million. That compares to revenue of $26.9 million in North America, $38.5 million in EMEA, and $11.8 million in APAC in the previous quarter.

“We delivered the highest non-GAAP operating income in five quarters while competing in a very difficult global economy,” said Extreme Networks President and CEO, Mark Canepa. “We launched three new product families during the fiscal year, adding to our broad set of products designed for the changing dynamics in the metro carrier, the data centre, and converged enterprise markets.”
Net income on a GAAP basis for the fourth quarter was $0.9 million or $0.01 per diluted share, compared to net income of $0.8 million or $0.01 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of last year.

Ipswitch Launches MOVEit DMZ Enterprise 6.5

Latest release features improved flexibility, governance, and virtualisation capabilities

Ipswitch, Inc. File Transfer division, the leading global developer of comprehensive
secure and managed file transfer solutions, today announced that integration of virtual folder capabilities and support for Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualised deployments are among the new features available in MOVEit DMZ Enterprise 6.5.

Designed to be the most secure and compliant managed file transfer server available, MOVEit DMZ Enterprise is optimised for mission-critical Internet-facing encrypted file, message and data transfers with global vendors and partners. MOVEit DMZ Enterprise 6.5 also includes the following new capabilities for administrators and end users:

Greater Platform Flexibility and Support:

· Microsoft Hyper-V support
· 32-bit emulation support for Windows Server 2003 64-bit

Improved Flexibility of Folder Structure:

· MOVEit DMZ Enterprise end users can now utilise virtual folders as a shortcut to link to a folder on the network
· Administrators can implement folders that are shared by multiple users to aid in efficient file sharing among employees and business partners

Enhanced Centralisation of Administrative Control:

· Administrators can now configure MOVEit DMZ to pull a user’s home folder directly from LDAP and Active Directory

· Superior Performance for Group Administrators:

· Significant login and logoff speed improvements for group administrators managing a large number of groups

· Additional Commitment to Serving the Germanic Market:

· End-user, group administration and Secure Messaging Web interfaces, Help files, and the MOVEit Wizards now available in German

Improved SSH Key & SSL Certificate Management:

· Programmers can use the MOVEit DMZ or Java API for programmatic SSH key and SSL certificate management
· This API now enables SSH keys and SSL certificates to be automatically imported, added, removed and listed to user accounts

64-bit Support for Windows 2008 and 2003

· MOVEit DMZ Enterprise is a 32-bit application that runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit).

Backed by an accessible, high quality support staff, MOVEit DMZ Enterprise can be quickly put into production without the need for costly outside professional services. MOVEit DMZ Enterprise can be deployed on a standalone basis or together with a MOVEit Central Enterprise workflow engine as a powerful advanced managed file transfer solution.

For more information, including how to arrange online and on-premise evaluations, live web-based demonstrations, or to discuss your requirements with a solutions architect or account manager, please contact +44 (0)7753 813 814 or
moveitsales@ipswitch.com.

About Ipswitch File TransferIpswitch File Transfer builds software to securely move your most valuable data. The Ipswitch MOVEit® and WS_FTP® secure and managed file transfer solutions deliver the security and governance necessary to help enable compliance for more than 40 million global users - including the majority of Fortune 1000 enterprises and government agencies. These organisations trust Ipswitch File Transfer solutions to secure, manage, automate and streamline their most-critical file transfers and data workflows. We invite you to learn more at
www.IpswitchFT.com or to contact us at www.IpswitchFT.com/contact, on LinkedIn or Twitter.

About Ipswitch, Inc.More than 100 million people worldwide use Ipswitch software to transfer files over the Internet using the market-leading WS_FTP® and MOVEit® brands of secure and managed file transfer clients and servers, monitor their networks with Ipswitch WhatsUp®, and communicate via Ipswitch IMailTM Server. Founded in 1991, the company is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts, has Research & Development and Sales centres in Georgia and Wisconsin and a European sales and support office in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ipswitch sells its products through distributors, resellers and OEMs in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Visit
www.ipswitch.com for more information on the company.

# # #

Ipswitch, MOVEit, WhatsUp and WS_FTP are registered trademarks of Ipswitch, Inc. IMail Server, MOVEit Central and MOVEit DMZ are trademarks of Ipswitch, Inc. All other product names are the property of their respective owners.<


FuelQuest Advises On Purchase Intelligence For Profit At The Pump


FuelQuest, the leading on-demand software and services company for the global downstream energy industry, has today issued advice for petrol retailers on purchase intelligence in light of the fluctuating fuel prices across the country. During this period of economic uncertainty, it is important that petrol retailers manage their fuel purchases efficiently to ensure that stock levels and profit margins are maintained, if not improved.

Despite the recent increases in the price of crude oil in recent months, it is still less than half of the $140-a-barrel high it reached last year and in light of this, some petrol retailers have taken the opportunity to pass the savings onto their customers.

“Due to the fluctuating fuel prices, retailers are locked in tight competition,” said FuelQuest’s President & CEO, Matt Tormollen. “Customers will ultimately buy at the lowest price and those retailers procuring fuel at low cost will be able to pass the benefits onto the customer, whilst improving margins.”


With fuel prices ranging from Asda’s 99.9 pence per litre to 109.9 pence per litre and more at other forecourts across the country, petrol retailers are being advised to seize greater control over fuel operations and supply chain activities in order to be able to reduce fuel prices and improve consumer benefits. Greater control can also lead to optimal order placement to gain advantage of the best supply price and the best fit with the usage forecast on every delivery, thereby benefiting both the retailer and the customer.

Tuesday 28 July 2009

Extreme Networks & Scale Computing Market Low Cost Storage & Networking Solution

Extreme Networks today announced that it is broadening its reach in the data centre by working with Scale Computing, an emerging company specialising in enterprise-class scalable and clustered storage solutions using commodity-based hardware to drive down the costs of enterprise storage. The two companies will each draw from their product lines to help customers with the economic realities associated with increased reliance on data storage and decreased budgets.

“Roughly 40 percent of all storage spending is from SMBs and 30 percent of all data stored by 2011 will be from health care,” said Scale Computing’s Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Peter Fuller. “This partnership offers true value to key industries that need to store more data and spend less money in order to maintain their competitive edge and compliance with pending regulations. With Scale Computing and Extreme Networks, customers get feature-rich budget relief for their storage and networking needs.”

Extreme Networks will offer its BlackDiamond® 8800 modular switching family, featuring industry-leading 10 Gigabit network capacity, the Summit® X650 and Summit X450 switches, supporting copper and fiber for cost-effective and scalable networks. Scale will offer its SN1000 and SN2000 storage nodes with TrueClusterTM architecture.

When purchased together, these products represent a complete data networking and IP storage solution that addresses back-up and replication of data by combining high performance Ethernet switching, from Fast Ethernet to 10 gigabits, with Scale’s TrueCluster architecture. Supporting iSCSI, NFS, and SAMBA/CIFS., TrueCluster has no single point of failure and costs only $15,000 for 6 usable TBs (12 TB Raw).

Extreme Networks’ complete portfolio of Ethernet switching solutions adds intelligence to the data centre via the ExtremeXOS® modular operating system and Universal Port software, a framework for detecting and responding to events on the network. To ensure seamless operation of the network and surrounding infrastructure, Extreme Networks’ Universal Port automatically detects attachment and detachment to the network by Scale Computing’s storage solutions, dynamically provisioning resources and appropriate levels of Quality of Service for the most intensive storage functions.

“Extreme Networks is driving higher performance of Ethernet at lower costs with the added intelligence of the event-driven network,” said Extreme Networks’ Regional Director for UK and Ireland, Gary Newbold. “Together, Extreme Networks and Scale Computing address the market’s evolving networking and storage needs with cost-effective and open solutions.”

To learn more about Extreme Networks high performance data centre solutions, visit http://www.extremenetworks.com/solutions/datacenter.aspx.

Extreme Networks & Scalable Communications Provide Charles Russell With Future Proofed Network


Extreme Networks and its Platinum Partner Scalable Communications have today announced that international law firm Charles Russell is using a selection of its BlackDiamond® and Summit® family switches to develop a flexible and resilient network infrastructure with the foundation to support future developments.

Charles Russell, a top 50-full service firm, is dedicated to developing business relationships and works with clients ranging from international organisations and FTSE and AIM listed businesses to private companies, governments, not-for-profit organisations and private individuals. Following its move to new offices in Fleet Place, Charles Russell required a new network that would offer the reliability and resiliency necessary to provide interoperability with 21st century networking solutions such as IP-Telephony. Charles Russell also needed a robust wireless infrastructure to support and seamlessly integrate both corporate employees and visitors to access the network.


“We were required to set up the new network in a very short timescale and there was no room for error,” said Charles Russell Director of IT Lee Hanley. “Our primary concern was to have a secure, resilient network that was fully compatible with all the applications and technologies we required to run alongside it.”

Monday 27 July 2009

Press release: eema Fellowship Award Presented To Jon Shamah


European association’s highest accolade recognisesservices to European e-identity...

eema, the European association for e-identity and security, has today announced Jon Shamah as the recipient of its prestigious Fellowship Award, in recognition of his services to European e-identity. Each year eema awards its highest accolade to member of the association who has made an outstanding contribution to its goals.

For further information or an interview with Jon Shamah, please contact eemapr@mccint.com

Monday 20 July 2009

News Release: Extreme Networks And McAfee Form Strategic Alliance To Promote Secure Networking

Companies partner to extend the benefits of open, secure and high performance connectivity addressing the paramount challenges of Enterprise IT

Extreme Networks today announced that that it has formed a Strategic Alliance with security leader McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE) addressing secure networking for enterprise organisations.

Working together, Extreme Networks® and McAfee can provide world-class, secure, unified networks to mutual customers delivered through the companies’ comprehensive portfolios of high performance Ethernet networking and security (threat management) solutions. The security portfolio from McAfee addresses host security, network intrusion detection and prevention, firewall, and data leakage security requirements to protect the Enterprise LAN.

“McAfee’s experience, insight and proven ability to deliver scalable and pervasive security and threat solutions to IT organisations ensures that our mutual customers will be able to address their enterprise business productivity and stability challenges as part of our relationship,” said Extreme Networks Vice President and General Manager for the Volume Products Group, Paul Hooper. “We are delighted to have McAfee join our extensibility ecosystem.”

The Extreme Networks/McAfee strategic alliance will include joint marketing of secure network solutions, and interoperability testing to support secure network solutions. Joint customers will benefit from McAfee’s cloud-based Global Threat Intelligence supported by McAfee’s leading security research experts. Customers also benefit from being able to manage their security applications through McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator software, a centralised management console to help secure organisations from a vast and ever-growing threat landscape.

“McAfee is joining forces with Extreme Networks to extend reliable and secure networking to our mutual global customers, allowing them the best possible choices in securing their applications and communications with simplified, high performance solutions,” said McAfee Executive Vice President of the Network Security Business Unit, Dan Ryan. “Customers can be more confident in their IT and business endeavours through intelligent integration of their network and security infrastructures.”

McAfee is the world’s largest dedicated security company, providing a comprehensive network security portfolio with solutions that address the entire spectrum of vulnerability, including threat detection, anti-virus and perimeter protection.
Extreme Networks delivers simplified, high performance Ethernet network infrastructure addressing data convergence with its ExtremeXOS®-based BlackDiamond®, Summit® high performance Ethernet switches.

Extreme networks portfolio of solutions, including switches, enterprise network management and services outfit the edge of the LAN, to the core of the network, to data centres and cloud computing infrastructures with gigabit and 10 gigabit scalability, intelligent energy efficiency and highly reliable protocol for integrated data and communications.

Wednesday 15 July 2009

FirstGroup America and FuelQuest Continue Partnership

FuelQuest, the leading on-demand software and services company for the global downstream energy industry, announced today a multi-year renewal with FirstGroup America, the largest provider of surface transportation services in North America. Under the new agreement, FuelQuest’s Fuel Center, the company’s outsourced fuel management service, will expand its management of FirstGroup’s fuel operations to an additional 100+ sites in the USA and Canada. FirstGroup has engaged FuelQuest since 2006 to streamline fuel management, ensure supply security and help keep down fuel costs.

Fuel Center provides their clients with a team of fuel industry experts, to help reduce overall fuel related expenditures and to better ensure security of fuel supply.

"FirstGroup is a next generation company. We are proud to be associated with this global transportation leader. They have been a great partner, and we look forward to contributing to their future success,” said FuelQuest's Vice President & General Manager of Fuel Services, Ryan Mossman.

Tuesday 14 July 2009

MCC International Complete the Race for Life


On Sunday 12th July MCC International's very own Alison Garvey, Joanna Cannon, Alex Kenchington and Kelly Friend ran the Race for Life with Miranda Evans from Clickfire, a local web design company. They joined 9,500 other women on Southampton Common to raise money for Cancer Research and completed the run in 51 minutes, raising over £600.

Donations can still be made through the MCC International Race for Life donation page at www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/mccinternational

Monday 13 July 2009

Service Providers Pushed To The Extreme

In response to recent reports by IT PRO suggesting that Internet traffic is to quadruple by 2013, Extreme Networks is advising service providers to deploy native Ethernet solutions to cater for the increase in bandwidth to support video access and other streaming services online while reducing cost. The popularity of 3G mobile phones such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, further increases Internet traffic, so service providers need to offer best-in-class solutions in order to derive sufficient profits from increased traffic.

According to these reports, mobile computing will drive the increase across both the business and consumer markets. Business users increasingly deploy video communications, leading to IP traffic growth, and investing in telephony solutions in addition to data centre consolidation, which in turn places more demands on the service provider.

In the mobile, residential and business space, mobile devices carrying streaming video, gaming and digital TV services are becoming very popular. Service providers must respond to this by offering high standards of availability, faster connection speeds and multicasting services to support both distributive and interactive video-services. Demands from the end user community mean that service providers must be empowered by solutions that are capable of delivering reliable speed with high density.

Monday 6 July 2009

Zmags Expands European Presence In Response to Growing Demand for Digital Collateral


Zmags, which helps marketers engage customers through Interactive Collateral Management (ICM), today announced it has almost doubled its European customer base over the last two quarters with the signing of new clients, including Dods and the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC). Existing customers, such as Barclays, Homebase, Lotus and Michelin have also renewed their subscription to Zmags’ Software as a Service (SaaS) to handle the demand from leading marketers and publishers.

Jens Karstoft, CEO of Zmags, commented, “This is an exciting time for Zmags. Globally, we added more than 400 new customers in recent months, bringing our total customer base to more than 2,400 companies in 35 countries.”

Zmags’ Interactive Collateral Management (ICM) solution provides a way for companies to digitise and deliver interactive documents to customers and then measure reading behavior. Zmags can be used to share any type of collateral online, including brochures, catalogues, magazines, direct mail and other business documents. Zmags can also be linked directly to e-commerce systems to make it easier for readers to make purchases to help marketers lower production costs, increase reach and generate more revenue.

Friday 3 July 2009

The first steps to making commercial sense of social media

Graham Thatcher, Director of MCC International

In the busy world in which we live social networking websites enable us to be to reunited with old friends and keep in touch with friends and family with ease.

Yet while every organisation has embraced the web to some extent, most have been quiet onlookers (perhaps blissfully unaware, or a little intimidated) as early adopters explore the commercial potential of social networking.
Right now your customers, prospects, business partners, members of the press and employees (although hopefully in their own time) are frequently logging on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Linked In as well as specialist blogs, online forums and digital publications. However, monitoring, managing and making the most of these sites in a commercial sense can be a daunting prospect for the uninitiated, so here are some basic tips on how to get started.
To receive the rest of this article or to discuss social networking opportunities, please contact Graham Thatcher or Fiona Brewer by email: info@mccint.com or phone: 01962 888 100

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Extreme Networks Suggest Four Fast Methods To Boost Education Network Efficiency



As students and teachers enjoy a needed summer break, the next six weeks is the time for network administrators to revitalise their network infrastructure by fine-tuning security policy, boosting network performance and creating energy efficient network. Extreme Networks details four simple tips to improve the network within K-12 school districts and college campus environments.

Optimised network connectivity supports advanced lesson plans that integrate data, voice and video content over a secure, high-performance network. The ability to achieve value with existing network infrastructure saves time and resources while greatly improving the educational experience of students and staff.

1. Review Security and Network Policy:
With the realisation that today’s students and staff are relying more on life-streaming blogging applications such as Twitter and Facebook, carrying iPhones, BlackBerries and traditional laptops that connect to Ethernet networks over 802.11 Wi-Fi, the network is the backbone of these institutions. By implementing the right settings, students’ traffic and behaviour remain in control of the network administrator.

Implementing network policies, schools can better track and log reporting for devices and users by username and MAC/IP address or separate sensitive information from the Internet with the use of dynamic policy enforcement and Virtual LANs (VLANs); or even remove offline sensitive data. With these steps, the potential chaos from both managed and unmanaged devices and user activities on the network can be reduced while essential online educational activities thrive.

2. Ramp-Up Quality of Service
Converged networks offer increased levels of traffic, from voice, video and data coming through the network. By leveraging centralised network management and network automation via scripting to replicate one class of settings across all network switches in one stroke, IT administrators can truly increase operational efficiency of deployment and configuration changes.

For example, Extreme Networks offers the “QoSConfig” script, via the Widget Central website, is used for configuring QoS settings across multiple sets of Ethernet switches. Quality of service settings per network port is enabled by establishing profiles with specific optimisations settings to deliver an intended level of network service.


3. Powering Up and Down for Efficiency
Energy efficiency is a growing theme on school campuses and the network is no different. Find network switches with intelligent settings for powering down select ports so that connected IP handsets, IP cameras and similar devices power down completely during off hours or during summer break.

4. Establish Redundancy
Lesson plans are incorporating digital presentation displays, Internet connected white boards among other Web-based applications. This means that network availability is essential. To ensure that classes go on without a hitch, establish redundant network switches and connections, as well as protecting fiber links with failover protocols. High performance Ethernet edge switches should provide dual homed uplinks that allow for connections to a redundant aggregation or core layer. Additionally, network resiliency protocols, such as EAPS (RFC #3619), should be supported to deliver sub 50 millisecond failover should a fiber cable be cut or interrupted. This way, communications and data, as well as class lessons, continue effortlessly.

To learn more about Extreme Networks high performance network solutions for education, visit: http://www.extremenetworks.com/solutions/highereducation.aspx