According to the company, available as part of the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) and Nimsoft On Demand offerings, the extended feature set includes real-time usage metering, elastic portlets and unified service dashboards. Service providers and IT staffs can now automatically create and deliver monitoring data and alerts that expand and contract with cloud and virtualized service delivery, while tracking and archiving usage in real time for auditing and billing purposes.

It avers that elastic IT services are highly appealing to customers who want their costs to dynamically align with their actual utilization. These new capabilities simplify the real-time monitoring and management of infrastructures that service providers use to deliver elastic IT services, enabling them to automate the presentation of monitoring dashboards to clients and flexibly bill for their monitoring services.

The company mentions that key enhancements to NMS and Nimsoft On Demand include:

• Real-time Usage Metering: Automated, granular reporting and usage monitoring enables service providers to bill their clients accordingly. Usage monitoring and metering is viewable by both service providers and clients 24/7 on the Nimsoft unified monitoring portal, which can integrate seamlessly into any other portal. Usage metering updates occur at hourly intervals.
• Elastic Portlets: Dynamic display portlets automatically expand and contract with the monitored IT Infrastructure, displaying key monitoring data. These portlets are reusable across service provider clients and IT organizations.
• Unified Service Dashboards: Reusable and automatically updated, these customized dashboards are easily constructed by aggregating elastic portlets, usage metering data and other information. NMS and Nimsoft On Demand come pre-packaged with out-of-the-box service dashboards for VMware health and performance, Amazon Web Services and overall data center performance. Dashboard views can be tightly coupled with the service provider’s service catalog, including cloud-based services.

It adds that the new unified monitoring capabilities are now available for both NMS and Nimsoft On Demand as features of the solution, to new and existing customers alike, at no additional cost.

“Virtualization and the implementation of public and private clouds are driving a major shift in the way IT services are delivered,” said Gary Read, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Nimsoft business unit at CA Technologies. “Our ‘see as you go – pay as you go’ unified monitoring solutions enable IT staffs and service providers to better understand and manage these new delivery models, without requiring incremental investments, re-learning of technology or implementation of new infrastructure requirements.”

“Nimsoft is well-known for its flexible, scalable approach to monitoring internal and external cloud services,” said Albert Lee, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. “These real-time usage metering capabilities and customized dashboards look to be a practical development for IT administrators to monitor and manage infrastructure and services, in line with the continued growth of the ‘pay as you go’ model we are seeing increasingly embraced across the industry.”

“Our ISV partners are extending their on-premise enterprise application products to include on-demand SaaS ones,” said Marty Gauvin, CEO and President of Virtual Ark, an international managed services company. “With these new features, Nimsoft On Demand allows us to adjust monitoring services depending on our clients’ dynamic needs. This enables us to align our costs closely to revenues from end users buying the SaaS solutions we provide through our ISV partners, thereby significantly reducing both the risk and cost of delivering an on-demand SaaS version of their traditional enterprise applications. The enhanced Nimsoft solution will help us continue to provide premiere service levels and improve both our top and bottom lines.”

The company claims that its acquisition of Day will strengthen the company’s enterprise software solutions with market leading Web Content Management (WCM), Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration offerings. This acquisition represents a significant market opportunity for it to help organizations transform themselves by enabling them to create, manage, distribute and monetize content while optimizing the web experience for their customers.

It explains that Day’s web solutions combined with the company’s existing enterprise portfolio will enable customers to better integrate their global web presence and business applications, unlocking value across their marketing, sales and service processes. In addition, Day customers will be able to leverage more interactive application and document capabilities from Adobe AIR, Adobe Flash, Flex, Adobe LiveCycle and PDF. The combination of Day and the company will help customers realize the full potential of the web in acquiring, servicing and retaining their customers, without disrupting their existing IT infrastructures.

The company mentions that as part of the expected integration of the two companies, Day will operate as a product line within its Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit. Day CEO Erik Hansen will join the company reporting directly to Rob Tarkoff.

It states that the proposed offer represents a premium of 59 percent over Day’s volume-weighted average share price for the last 60 trading days. The Board of Directors of Day unanimously recommends the offer to Day shareholders. The Chairman and the CEO of Day and other Board members have entered into undertakings to tender their shares.

The company further states that the completion of the transaction, which is subject to customary government approvals and the satisfaction of other customary conditions, including a minimum acceptance threshold with respect to the tender offer, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of its 2010 fiscal year. It expects the acquisition will have no material impact on its non-GAAP earnings for fiscal year 2010 and that it will be accretive to non-GAAP earnings for fiscal year 2011.

“Adobe’s acquisition of Day represents a key milestone in our efforts toward delivering best-in-class customer experience management solutions to enterprises and governments worldwide,” said Rob Tarkoff, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe. “With the addition of Day to our enterprise portfolio, we will be able to enhance the value of our offering and deliver on our vision of the web as the hub of customer interaction.”

“Organizations around the globe have recognized the importance of the online and mobile channel and turned to Day as their enterprise standard for next generation Web Content Management,” said Erik Hansen, CEO, Day Software. “We are excited to join Adobe and combine our expertise in WCM with technologies that create and deliver rich online and offline experiences leveraging the ubiquity of Flash and PDF. We believe this is a winning combination for both Adobe and Day customers.”

It articulates that the company, formerly the carrier arm of Tiscali Group, has network presence and customers in EMEA, Americas and APAC, and provides global IP transit and Ethernet connectivity to service and content providers, and carriers, within seven working days. It also guarantees customers proactive management of service level agreements and protection from DDoS attacks.

“Tinet’s acquisition of the capacity on the TEA systems adds further value, both in terms of increased network diversity and improved latency for our IP Transit and Ethernet customers, particularly those who run time-sensitive applications,” remarks Paolo Susnik, CEO of Tinet. “The route is indicative of Tinet’s continued focus on the needs of our wholesale customers who engage in carrier solutions to the financial trading markets, VoIP and other time sensitive applications.”

The online study of more than 2,200 members of the Great British public carried out by YouGov and Softwareload.co.uk, Deutsche Telekom’s online download portal for software applications, also found that whenever possible 13 per cent of Britons take their laptops on holiday with them. 16 per cent of men take their laptop away on holiday compared to just a tenth (10 per cent) of women. Just four per cent of women said they do a little work on holiday when they take their laptop with them on holiday. But technology hasn’t completely taken over; only five per cent of Britons say they would choose using recreational software on the laptop – such as educational software – while on holiday over reading a good book.

“While holiday is often a time to leave work behind and maybe even switch off the mobile, technology can enhance our holiday time with useful travel guides, language learning and translation apps available for laptops and mobiles,” said Dirk Lebzien, Head of Softwareload. “Our research shows that people are comfortable with their partner bringing their laptop computer on holiday with them, and thankfully few people are choosing work when on vacation.”

Softwareload’s study also found that a large number (39 per cent) of those surveyed are ‘embarrassed’ that they can’t speak the local language on holiday. Women (42 per cent) are slightly more likely than men (37 per cent) to feel embarrassed from just using English. 18-24 year-olds (43 per cent) and 25-34 year-olds (45 per cent) are more likely to feel embarrassed about not speaking the local language than any other group.

27 per cent of 18-24 year-olds said they would find translation software and offline maps stored on their mobile phone useful when on holiday, a higher percentage than any other group. Currently, although 31 per cent of UK holiday makers are aware that travel apps and dictionaries are available on mobile devices, only six per cent of Brits regularly use them, Softwareload found.

“Aerial photography reveals so much more about the situation on the ground than a map ever can,” said Steve Roberts, from Vtesse Networks. “The WMS feed from Getmapping is an extremely efficient way of providing us with access to nationwide aerial photography. It enables our network planners to zoom in, locate and identify buildings, at a sub-postcode level. They can get a really good idea of the issues involved with bringing our optical fibre networks into clients’ buildings. Aerial Photography is now an integral part of our pre-planning as it can be streamed straight into our MapInfo GIS network planning and asset management tool. Our existing network, fibre routes and assets are overlaid onto the aerial photography or Ordnance Survey maps enabling us to carry out evaluation and pre-planning without a site visit.”

WMS is a standard protocol for streaming geo-referenced maps and imagery over the Internet to web based applications, GIS and CAD software. WMS feeds only load the imagery that a user actually needs to see rather than a whole dataset, which often results in lengthy load times or delays when panning and zooming. Aerial photography which is a large dataset can put a heavy strain on a network especially when it is being accessed by many users at the same time. Having an external source available through WMS reduces network load and the costs associated with data storage and management. In addition because Getmapping’s WMS service is supplied on a subscription basis, there are none of the costs associated with purchasing a national dataset.

Getmapping WMS feeds are available for aerial photography, and Ordnance Survey mapping. In the case of maps all the available scales are layered into one WMS feed. This means that the feed detects the level of zoom and displays the most appropriate scale of mapping only delivering the data required. For example, with Ordnance Survey mapping when fully zoomed in the WMS will display MasterMap, and then when zooming out, say from a building to a neighbourhood, it will display OS StreetView.

The KXEN 2009/10 user survey polled 3000 users across more than 400 customers representing the telecommunications, banking, financial services, and retail sectors across North America, UK and EMEA and Asia. 54% of respondents work in organisations with greater than 1000 employees. More than 95% of respondents agreed KXEN’s software had met or exceeded their expectations while 96% declared a high or very high level of satisfaction.

Among survey respondents was Dr. Jacky Huyghebaert, Customer Intelligence Expert at leading European telecoms operator Belgacom. “KXEN is our customer lifecycle solution of choice. It’s fast to implement, consistently delivers high quality results and is central to all our marketing, sales, customer service and retention activities. It does everything we expect and even more. I’d have no hesitation recommending KXEN to anyone looking to energise their customer management operations.”

Reflecting market conditions over the last year, KXEN deployments in customer acquisition rose from 53% in 2008/9 to 70% in 2009/10. Similarly deployments in cross-sell and up-sell went up from 60% to 77% and climbed from 56% to 71% in customer retention and churn management.

Allen Thompson is Executive of Analytics at Bank of America Global Wealth Management, “The strengths and capabilities of KXEN provide us with improved visibility into our Global Wealth Management client base, as well as quickly and efficiently direct our marketing efforts,” he said. “Developing insights from our data is critical to our marketing efforts and KXEN plays a crucial role in this.”

KXEN CEO John Ball said it was clear from the survey findings that KXEN is helping users optimise their customer lifecycle management while driving significant incremental profit improvements. “We’re seeing more and more companies switching to KXEN as they leverage the strengths of our customer lifecycle solutions including ease of use, faster time to market and improved accuracy.”

The widespread emergence of mobile banking is having a huge transformative effect in both developed and emerging economies, a pioneering ‘mobile money’ business leader said today in Mumbai, India.

Richard Johnson, group strategy director of Monitise plc, said: “For the full potential of mobile banking and payments to be achieved, banks, payments networks and mobile network operators have realised that they must come together in partnership and collaboration.”

This type of collaboration will revolutionise the way people manage their money, and the effects will be felt worldwide, Mr Johnson added.

The development of mobile money networks will give people instant access to their finances on their mobile phone and enable them to conduct a multitude of transactions on the move, as well as having access to news and business information – and the social and economic impact will be dramatic.

• Bank account holders will be able to manage their finances easily and securely anywhere in the world, transfer funds and purchase items
• Mobile phone users can turn the handset into a ‘mobile wallet’ topped up with cash, enabling them to transfer money wirelessly and make payments in seconds

Mr Johnson, speaking to banking and telecoms leaders in Mumbai, continued: “Whether it is a consumer with multiple bank accounts who needs to stay in constant touch with their balance, or a mobile phone user who has never been in a bank or has no previous financial relationship, it is clear that India, steered by the progressive approach of the Reserve Bank, can lead the way in providing mobile financial access.”

• India has the world’s second largest population (1.1bn people) with 200 million of a 600 million working population having bank accounts – while almost 600 million have a mobile phone
• Around 91% of the US $703 billion spent by Indians annually is in the form of cash
• A 2005 study by the London Business School found that an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people in African developing countries would increase GDP growth by 0.6%

Monitise has helped to pioneer mobile banking around the world and been recognised as a ‘Technology Pioneer’ by the World Economic Forum for its ability to help engage people in developing countries into the banking and financial system. Previous winners included Google and Skype.

It has just launched a joint venture in India with Visa, one of the world’s leading global payments technology companies, to accelerate the delivery of mobile financial services such as banking, bill payments, mass transit ticketing, mobile top-up and others to Indian consumers.

Separately, Monitise is also developing mobile banking services in India with Standard Chartered Bank, with services for SCB‘s customers expected to go live in the next twelve months.

Mr Johnson was speaking today at a reception to inaugurate the joint venture with Visa, attended by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who was leading a government delegation to India with the British prime minister David Cameron and foreign secretary William Hague.

In his address Mr Osborne stressed the importance of trade between India and the UK and praised Monitise as an example of a British business exporting its innovation and expertise overseas.

He said: “India is renowned for its world class innovation and its technology and financial services sectors are enviable. So it is great to see an entrepreneurial and innovative British company like Monitise exporting its skills and expertise to India and creating new, strong partnerships here.”

The joint venture between Monitise and Visa will initially offer balance inquiries, bill payments, and ticket purchases e.g. train, airline, cinema through participating partners, before diversifying into mobile money for the ‘unbanked’, and electronic transfers.

The Tobii T60 Eye Tracker is a unique device that, combined with Tobii Studio, offers the most comprehensive gaze analysis and visualization software available. Ideal for all forms of eye tracking studies with on-screen stimuli, the technology offers objective results for testing the usability of websites, software and computer games, without any visible “tracking devices” that might affect the user’s normal behaviour.

Cyber-Duck’s key clients are now able to obtain critical user behaviour analysis and insight into the user’s experience of their websites and applications. Highlighting features such as Gaze Plots, Retrospective Think-Aloud and Areas of Interest, the technology takes Cyber-Duck’s research and consultancy divisions to new heights. The technology dramatically enhances the objectivity of the design process, moving away from subjective ‘think aloud’ methods that require users to verbalise their actions.

Cyber-Duck have been using outsourced eye tracking since 2008 and have seen the technology dramatically increase ROI for clients, by improving both bottom line figures and conversion rates.

Khaled Weir, Web Strategist at Cyber-Duck said, “To get the most out of user centred design it’s critical to capture natural interaction without disrupting the user. We are privileged to be one of the only digital agencies in the world to utilise in-house eye tracking. This means we can enhance website, mobile and SaaS user experiences more quickly and methodically, saving our clients substantial amounts of development time, improving the return on their investment and giving them access to eye tracking capabilities at a fraction of their normal cost”.

Cyber-Duck purchased the eye tracker from Acuity ETS Ltd, the exclusive UK reseller for Tobii eye trackers and the sole distributor in the UK. Jon Ward, Director at Acuity commented, “We identified Cyber-Duck as a pioneer in User Centered Design and were impressed with their methodology. As well as using the eye tracker for large website and SaaS projects, Cyber-Duck are offering eye tracking as part of their design process and consultancy services. The integration of eye tracking throughout the User Centred Design process is both unique and hugely beneficial to Cyber-Duck’s clients”.

Participants have four categories to choose from, allowing them to express and share their entertaining videos, passions, interests and talents by entering one or all of the following:

• Donkey Circus – A series of contests extolling the art of the perfectly executed prank or hilarious moments in everyday life
• Radical Playground – Showing off the best in sporting prowess across the globe, whether its keep-ups or something more extreme
• Jam Planet – Whether Mozart, AC/DC, Street Dance or Ballroom are your thing there’s a spotlight waiting for your entertaining videos and talents with an axe, piano or your feet on Jam Planet
• Beauty Island – Celebrating beauty in all its forms and the things we do to show it off!

“ShowMe.tv offers a new and unique stance on the growing ‘download, upload, view and vote’ culture that is so popular across social media sites, by financially rewarding the voter as well as the winning contributor. We want to create a community of people who can share their talents and interests across a variety of catchy categories while being rewarded for their hard work,” commented Showme.tv co-founder, Simone Patrese. “Entertainment is at the heart of ShowMe.tv and we’re looking forward to seeing the amazing things the public will put on show over the coming weeks.”

Every month ShowMe.tv will launch contests across each of its categories for the community to enter and place votes on their favourite entries. Each contest will last eight weeks and be won by the video entry that receives the most votes. The contest lifecycle breaks down in the following way:

• Initial six weeks of contest: Contests are promoted through marketing activities and social networking driven by users on the web, while participants upload their entries. The ShowMe.tv hosts, who present the shows and interact with the community, will also promote each contest.
• Final two weeks of contest: The videos are published and voting commences (users are unable to view rankings until the end of final round). Up to 100 videos receiving the most votes will proceed to the final round during the second week. At the end of the second week the best videos will be announced and cash prizes assigned.

Here are the opening contests for each category, as of July 2010:

• Donkey Circus – ShowMe your funniest wake-up prank
• Radical Playground – ShowMe your most amazing football tricks
• Jam Planet – ShowMe your best pop star impersonation
• Beauty Island – ShowMe your best method of seduction

Participants must be over 18 and register as ShowMe.tv members to participate in the community. Once registered, users can place a vote against a video during the last two weeks of the contest. These votes ensure the whole community can participate in voting, and encourage other members of the community to become involved in the voting process. Basic membership enables standard voting to select a winning video but does not carry any entitlement to prize money.

However, if a user registers as a Premium Member, there are two ways their votes can win cash prizes on ShowMe.tv. Firstly, they can buy up to 100 Super Votes at £1 each, to place against a video in a contest. Unlike standard votes, this can be repeated across as many competitors in a contest as the member wishes.

At the end of a contest, premium members that have voted on a winning video will receive a prize, valued at a multiple of the Super Votes they placed. The multiple is defined based on the total number of votes in the competition and those of the winning videos.

The second voting option is through the Jackpot game, which is harder to win, but offers bigger prizes. Open in the second week of voting, voters guess the final ranking of the first five participants in a contest, by creating a top five list. The Jackpot is activated in the second week of voting when the specified number of entries is met for that contest, this ensures it is always played on the best videos. Voters can buy a £1 top five list with their forecast; there is no limit to the number of lists that can be bought. The amount collected by ShowMe is accrued contest after contest until there is a winner. Where there are multiple winners, the Jackpot is split equally.

External sponsors will be allowed on the ShowMe.tv site in the future, offering additional opportunities for engagement with brands and rewards for our members.