Posted by Sophia McKeown and Chris Patterson

This is the first year that vendors have been invited to showcase their offerings, and NaviSite is one of the few hosting providers participating in the vendor showcase. We’ve had a great deal of interest in our offerings as well as steady traffic to our booth. Our popular ‘got PCI’ bumper stickers are almost gone. The latest buzz on the street is focused on the new 1.2 Data Security Standard.  Specific information on the changes between 1.1 and 1.2 will be heating up blog discussions in future upon actual release of the standard…and we will be incorporating any changes into our service offerings. We are looking forward to additional networking sessions to hear about the ‘real world’ lessons learned from merchants of all levels and sizes. We haven’t seen any Disney characters attend the meetings, but maybe we’ll meet up with them next time we’re in Orlando.

Sophia McKeown is the Product Manager for PCI Compliance and Chris Patterson, CISSP, GCIH, G7799, CEH,  is the Product Manager for Infrastructure Services at NaviSite.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

By Rathin Sinha, Chief Marketing Officer 

Environment friendliness is no more a mere socially responsible gesture but an urgent need in today’s world. With rising reliability on information technology and greater emphasis on ‘Going Green’, the businesses are exploring ways to use IT for greening their operations. NaviSite moves along the green path with multiple initiatives that offer a combination of economic and environmental benefits to the customers.

Going green with technology: The possibilities 

With organizations across industries facing newer challenges to save the planet, the green talk is going beyond the boardrooms. The environmental challenges like reducing the carbon emissions, lowering energy consumption, and meeting strict environmental regulations are spurring the organizations to walk the green talk. Technology offers innovative ways to meet the environmental imperatives while helping companies build a sustainable future. Green IT possibilities extend across a company’s entire operations gamut – both external and internal.

Here are some key enterprise-wide green initiatives…are these part of your green agenda?

• Controlling material spend
• Adopting energy efficiency measures such as moving to a green data center
• Measuring your carbon footprint
• Using technology to manage product lifecycle and supply chain so that you create green products and services
• Adopting eco-friendly technologies such as Virtualization to eliminate server sprawl
• Purchasing IT products that meet environmental standards and perform multiple functions
• Recycling
• Telecommuting
  …and even switching off PCs when not in use and sharing desktop printers!

 Looking for a good reason to go green? 

Most organizations are going green because their customers and competitors are, but this is just one of the triggers. According to a recent research by IDC, most of the companies have just jumped onto the green IT bandwagon either because of the environmental mandates issued by the regulatory bodies or as part of their marketing strategy.

Another significant trigger for going green is cost. Contrary to the belief that going green is expensive, there are certain green initiatives, which if done right, can transform into cost and material savings. In the long term, every green IT initiative delivers technology solutions faster, efficiently, and cost-effectively – which is good for your organization, your bottom line, and your customers. For example, think that instead of using eight servers with 10% utilization, you switch to virtualization where one system works with 80% utilization – saving you hardware resources, power, cooling, and space, which further lowers your capital and operating cost by 30-50%, and you offer your customers a cost advantage. So, green is certainly good!

The reasons for going green can be many, but the common objective is to build a sustainable future for your business and save the planet. So, next time you hear about green IT, think of your business.

 Tread the green path with NaviSite! 

At NaviSite, we are helping our customers leverage the green technologies that align the climate and cost advantage. As a leading managed hosting and application services provider and a member of the Green Grid, we offer green data centers with environment-friendly equipment and software that reduce the energy consumption needed for cooling by more than 20% over conventional methods. We deploy virtualization technologies that reduce the power consumption as well as server sprawl – ensuring cost savings as well as eco-efficiency.

If you have any questions or need more information on Green IT, please contact the author of this article at rsinha@navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Keeping Healthcare Information Safe and Secure

eClinicalWorks is a privately-held medical software company serving more than 15,000 physicians with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Practice Management (PM) solutions for clinical practices. Ranked the fourth fastest-growing software company by Inc. magazine and ranked no. 1 in KLAS Enterprises’ Report Card for Ambulatory Billling and Scheduling, eClinicalWorks relies on NaviSite’s secure and scalable infrastructure environment to support the delivery of its healthcare technology software. 

The company’s unified Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Practice Management (PM) solutions are designed for healthcare facilities ranging from large group practices to medium, small and solo practices, regardless of specialty. The patient portal of eClinicalWorks enables patient communication through the web, so that healthcare providers can send out timely communication and patient advisories. With eClinicalWorks’ Electronic Health eXchange, clinical integration data, supported by NaviSite, is converted into community-wide projects. The community portal provides an overview of a patient’s ambulatory record with full hospital system integration.

Our customer since 2005, eClinicalWorks began its relationship with NaviSite with one colocation service solution at the Andover data center. Since then, eClinicalWorks has grown its business with NaviSite supporting its growth with solutions in our San Jose, Minneapolis and Vienna data centers. In addition, NaviSite is now providing managed services for eClinicalWorks in a managed hosting environment. NaviSite is rated the no. 1 application hosting provider for healthcare in a recent KLAS Enterprises Report.

The key factors in the success of eClinicalWorks are security and scalability – a reason why it continues to work with NaviSite. We offer rigorous security compliance around the data centers, including those set forth by Sarbanes-Oxley (SAS70 Type II Audited), Homeland Security, HIPAA, and others. In fact, when eClinicalWorks has potential customers of their own, the company often invites prospects to tour NaviSite’s data centers to demonstrate the back-end infrastructure security and support measures that are in place to protect their sensitive data.

eClinicalWorks’ philosophy is to seek out strong partners to collaborate with. As a customer-centric organization, the company is committed to controlling price, improving service, and accelerating implementations. eClinicalWorks enjoys working with NaviSite, based on a shared vision of improving the customer experience, while controlling costs and increasing efficiency.

If you need more information about NaviSite’s Enterprise Hosting and Application Services, please visit our website www.navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

Online Signup for Customers for Quick, Flexible Messaging Solution

By Dixie Meyer, Product Manager-Messaging

NaviSite has been a messaging expert for over a decade – providing customers with the full flexibility and functionality of hosted messaging solutions in a secure, highly-available, and reliable environment, coupled with complete management and 24×7 monitoring. We take a step forward to help our customers enjoy the benefits of Hosted Microsoft Exchange in less time and money, and in line with their needs – with our online sign up functionality.

On June 23, 2008, NaviSite went live with online sign up for Hosted Exchange. The online delivery allows new customers to sign up for 1 – 200 mailboxes, and receive a fully functional messaging solution within 24 hours. Our customers will have the ability to purchase, provision, and manage their environment that is hosted by NaviSite. This online solution also includes additional services such as SharePoint, mobile messaging, and archiving services. Customers can sign up easily for this service at http://www.navisite.com/email-collaboration/hosted-exchange.php by paying with a credit card.

The online service allows customers to scale up or down the mailboxes to fit their specific requirements and budget. Earlier, by going through a traditional sales model, the customers had to sign up for a minimum of 10 mailboxes along with a 12 month contract. Now with the online solution, they can sign up for a single mailbox and can then scale up on a monthly basis based on their needs. This saves them from signing a 12- or a 24-month contract, and consequently, from unnecessary costs and inconveniences.

“With our online Hosted Exchange delivery, we offer a customized messaging solution to our customers that grows with their business needs”, said Gina Murphy, Vice President, Product Management. “Our competitive feature-set, per-mailbox pricing, and easy additions of new features ensures that organizations get maximum return on their messaging investment.”

If you have any questions or need more information on our online Hosted Exchange solution or our other messaging solutions, feel free to contact the author of this article at dmeyer@navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

By Maria Mariotti, Marketing Programs Director, NaviSite US

Built to best-in-class data center standards as well as environmental standards for energy efficiency – NaviSite’s newest UK (Woking) data center makes itself known with its first $10 million contract from a leading European customer.

Proving that the demand for a premium data center and scalable network capacity in the European market continues to outdistance the available supply, NaviSite recently announced that a leading online European gaming operator has chosen the Woking data center to provide colocation services. The contract represents more than $10 million dollars of total contract value over a 10-year period.

NaviSite’s Woking data-center capacity delivers high density power and cooling of up to 2000 watts per square meter, supported by UPS and generator backup. In addition to meeting SAS70 Type II audited and energy standards, the data center is well equipped to provide managed services, including utility computing platform, secure back-up services, on-demand storage, virtual servers and network security solutions. Customers will be able to connect to the Internet via resilient carriers and utilize Content Delivery and Acceleration services.

“We’re thrilled that this customer has chosen NaviSite and will become the first to utilize our best-in-class European data center in Woking,” said Sean McAvan, Managing Director, NaviSite, U.K. “A major figure in European online gaming, this customer will use NaviSite’s new data center to house its network systems, web traffic, and infrastructure services.”

If you have any questions or need more information on the Woking data center, feel free to contact the author of this article at mmariotti@navisite.com.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

NaviSite and Intel Working Together to Sell Into the SMB Space

By Sumeet Sabharwal, Senior Vice President, Global Delivery

As you already know, NaviSite announced an alliance with Intel Corporation in April, 2008 to offer a suite of managed services sold through Intel’s value added reseller (VAR) community. The partnership had been in the making for over nine months, and provides NaviSite with an extensive, well manifested, and low cost channel to sell into the SMB market space. NaviSite’s Intel Hosting service, as it is marketed, is more than an addition to our managed services portfolio…it offers exciting growth opportunities both for NaviSite and for resellers in the SMB space.

NaviSite’s Intel Hosting Service offered through Intel provides resellers with a comprehensive menu of services to market under their own brands and satisfies the growing demand for such services in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment. In addition, NaviSite will assist the resellers in making the business transition to become managed service providers by providing the necessary delivery, technical, marketing, and sales support.

Let’s take a look at the key aspects of NaviSite’s Intel Hosting Service.

Why focus on the SMB space?

The market for managed services among SMBs represents the largest area of growth in this segment. Tier 1 Research, the independent research and consulting firm covering public and private companies within the IT industry, reports that managed hosting remains the largest segment within this sector and will continue to grow at a rate of 24 percent. According to Tier 1, SMBs and Mid-Market enterprises are fueling this growth in hosting services. With the Intel partnership, NaviSite can now access an established network to tap into this marketplace without the need for extensive investments on our end.

Why partner with Intel?

Partnering with Intel gives NaviSite an extensive community of well-established regional VARs who are already offering a wide-variety of services to the SMB marketplace. Some of these VARs are keen to expand into the Hosting space, and offer their customers managed services. However, they lack the scale, expertise, and infrastructure to provide such services, and view something like this as a quick and easy way to capture additional revenue, while extending their relationship with the customer. It also helps them to reshape their business model into the one based on recurring revenue with a higher degree of predictability.

What is the service labeled as Intel Hosting Service?

Given Intel’s established brand and relationships with its VAR community, we have made a conscious decision to leverage this and position the service as one that is being truly backed by Intel. It serves to reassure the VAR that the underlying services are being delivered from a stable platform with a high degree of reliability. In addition, Intel is really assuming the front role in marketing the service and training its VARs.

What underlying services are being offered? Why only focus on a subset of the NaviSite portfolio?

The portfolio of reseller services provided by NaviSite includes hosted email services with filtering and archiving, hosted collaboration suite for online information-sharing, online backup and remote monitoring and management services for all IT assets, including client servers, desktops and network devices. Not only will the program allow resellers the flexibility to select the right service combination to meet their customers’ needs, they will also have the added benefit of dealing with a single provider in NaviSite, thus avoiding compatibility and resolution issues for their customers. As we gain traction with the program, we will be looking to progressively expand the scope and nature of the underlying services.

Who can I go to for additional questions?

The program and relationship is being managed by  Sumeet Sabharwal (ssabharwal@navisite.com). Please feel free to contact him for additional details.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

NaviSite Adds New Dimension to Cloud Computing

By Denis Martin, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President 

In our last newsletter, we talked about NaviSite’s efforts towards developing a next generation application platform to add value to the services provided to our customers. After our extensive research efforts, we launch AppStructure – NaviSite’s entry into cloud computing and beyond. AppStructure is the dynamic infrastructure with bundled software tools for complex application and enterprise hosting support.

We have been using various forms of virtualization technology for processing, storage and network for years. In the past 18 months, we have been focusing on further ‘productization’ of our virtualization platform and expanded features and functions. The result is AppStructure! As a virtualized infrastructure, AppStructure provides all the services expected from an on-demand, elastic platform. With AppStructure, we can quickly provision and even dynamically allocate CPU’s, memory, storage and network. The platform provides inherent business continuity and availability with fail over and redundancy. It also provides greater ability to scale and operate efficiently.

Being an enterprise hosting and application service provider, our virtualized offerings go beyond physical infrastructure and operating systems. Our approach to virtualization is designed to provide support for complex systems and application integration. In line with our original Collaborative Application Management systems and NaviView portal, AppStructure provides support for a range of Web 2.0 and SOA tools.

The SOA software toolset is primarily focused on functionality packaged as services for building application connectors – to facilitate data transfer and application integration. This enterprise system bus approach on the dynamic infrastructure makes AppStructure a truly unique offering. The platform also includes AJAX-based development support with various Web 2.0 tools for wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.

We are extremely excited about AppStructure and believe it will help us further differentiate in a complex market. As Software-as-a-Service and outsourcing continue to grow and evolve, enterprises are increasingly challenged to integrate applications to support business needs. AppStructure’s integrated technology environment makes enterprises more responsive and adaptable to the fast-changing needs.

If you have any questions on AppStructure or want to know how NaviSite can help you benefit from this, feel free to contact the author of this article at DMartin@navisite.com.

Posted by William Toll

Why should reliability, security, and performance only be available to the Enterprise?  These fundamental technology hosting requirements are just as important, and in some cases more important, to the small business.  Small businesses are just that – small, and any issue could cause big problems that small businesses just cannot afford – both financially and with the public perception of their offering.

It is often said:

A visitor to a Website has less than 3 seconds of patience while waiting for a Web page to load or home page to appear.

A small business that does not backup up its data has a higher rate of failure than one that does backup their data.

With reliability, security, and performance being so important, for both SMB’s and Enterprises, it makes sense for service providers that have the capability to service both customers with the same fundamental core set of functionality.  This is exactly the NaviSite philosophy: deliver the foundational requirements of the Enterprise and make it accessible to the SMB.

All NaviSite dedicated servers feature powerful CPUs, dual hard drives, RAID 1 or better, Intrusion Protection System b Tipping Point, Anti-Virus for the server, all delivered across a Cisco powered network and  Tier-1 network providers.

Posted by NaviSite Quarterly

NaviSite’s Shared Hosting Platform

By William Toll, Director Product Management, Shared Hosting

NaviSite’s shared hosting platform offers a rare combination of best-in-class virtual infrastructure, continuous support, and unmatched reliability – a reason why over 150,000 end-customers depend on our hosting solutions. As a leader in the hosting space, we continue to enhance our solutions in alignment with changing customer needs. This is what helps us win the confidence of our customers and take them towards newer heights of success.

The Shared Hosting business unit at NaviSite has two key components:

• Alabanza: A Reseller platform that powers over 200 SMBs and provides them with a hosted managed infrastructure and associated automation software to run an independent shared hosting business. For example, several of our resellers host, manage and assist over 5,000 small businesses with their Websites and Internet-based applications. An Alabanza reseller has the services and products which enable a small business to have a presence on the Web. Right from an ecommerce storefront, to a blog to the software needed to build an online community, Alabanza has everything they need for success. Today, over 120,000 small businesses depend on Alabanza and our resellers.
• Hosting Ventures: This includes several direct brands including successfulhosting.com, linuxwebhost.com and others that provide shared hosting packages to SMBs and consumers. Our shared Web hosting brands are some of the most valuable and diverse in the industry.

While we generated much unwanted attention during the Alabanza migration, we have come a long way since in rebuilding the confidence of our customers and expanding the platform to provide a continued high level of service. Our customers now enjoy the benefits of a stable enterprise solution with a truly virtual infrastructure – something which is really unheard of in the shared hosting industry. We continue to invest in the proprietary DSM platform for enhancements and new additions to our products and services – enabling our resellers to capitalize on the full value of the relationships with their downstream customers.

Having a shared platform with thousands of well-published domains does present some challenges. A key challenge is SPAM, which we are addressing as a key priority with the introduction of solutions from external providers like MX Logic.

On the direct side, our Hosting Ventures brands, which include SuccessfulHosting, are experiencing growth and customer satisfaction. The customers for these brands are veterans of the Web; they understand and know the importance of the Web and the powerful applications we enable them with. These small businesses share their success stories with each other, and word of mouth keeps our Hosting Ventures growing and lively. In the coming months, we will continue to enhance the offerings and begin a program to attract additional customers.

If you have any questions or need more information on our Shared Hosting business, feel free to contact Sumeet Sabharwal (ssabharwal@navisite.com) or William Toll (wtoll@navisite.com).