New York, New York - (The Hosting News) - January 6, 2009 - The SSON and IQPC Annual Shared Services Excellence Awards categories have been revealed for the 13th Annual Shared Services Week, scheduled to take place March 22-27, 2009 at the Omni Orlando Resort in Orlando, Florida.

The categories include:

• Best Mature Captive Services Delivery (over 3 years operation)
• Best Mature Outsourced Services Delivery (over 3 years operation)
• Best New Captive SSC (under 3 years operation)
• Best New Outsourced SSC (under 3 years operation)
• Best Shared Services and Sourcing Thought Leader
• Shared Services Employer of the Year

Each application will be considered in isolation for that award, and participants may enter in as many or few categories as they choose. All awards applications must be submitted by January 30, 2009.

The Shared Services Excellence Awards are open to all shared services organizations (SSOs) from all countries. The awards are judged by a leading panel of industry experts and provide an opportunity for shared services professionals to gain recognition for excellence and initiative.

Members of the Shared Services Excellence Awards Judging Panel are:

• Leo Hazlewood, Director, Shared Services, SAIC
• Gary Silsbe, Director of Operational Excellence, TELUS
• Richard Rowan, Global Director of Shared Services, TRW
• Carol Kuntz, Vice President of Operations, CNA Insurance
• Jim Rundgren, Manager, Continuous Improvement and Operations Administration, Northrop Grumman
• Melissa Lytell, Director, HR Shared Services, U.S. Department of State
• Linda Taglialatela, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources, U.S. Department of State
• Lee Coulter, Vice President of Shared Services, Kraft

First Place and Honorary Mention Awards will be announced and presented to the winners at the Black Tie Gala Dinner Awards ceremony held on Tuesday, March 24th at Shared Services Week 2009 in Orlando.

For more information, contact Naomi Secor at 212-885-2742 or naomi.secor@iqpc.com.

IQPC provides business executives with tailored practical conferences, large-scale events, topical seminars and in-house training programs, keeping them up-to-date with industry trends, technological developments and the regulatory landscape. Producing over 1,500 events annually around the world, IQPC continues to grow and has offices in cities across six continents.

For more information about the awards, please visit: www.sharedservicesweek.com/awards.php.

To learn more about IQPC, please visit: www.iqpc.com.

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Web Hosting Shared Services Excellence Awards Scheduled

Atlanta, Georgia - (The Hosting News) - January 6, 2009 - Web hosting and managed integrated VoIP services provider, Cbeyond, has released a new Enhanced Web Hosting service for small businesses, including a design-it-yourself tool, marketing capabilities and an e-commerce solution.

Geoff Cummings, product manager for Web Hosting at Cbeyond remarked, ”Consumers research purchases in a variety of ways, and an attractive, easy-to-use website is an integral part of a company’s brand, not just a ‘nice-to-have’ feature. Small businesses need a professional online presence to effectively market their company and sell their products and services. With Cbeyond’s Enhanced Web Hosting application, small businesses can establish, promote and manage their online presence, as well as provide customers with 24-hour access to their products and services via a dynamic website.”

Cbeyond’s Enhanced Web Hosting service allows small businesses to quickly and easily manage their online assets to effectively market their company, promote their products and services, and acquire new customers. Small businesses can purchase Enhanced Web Hosting as a base package with the option of adding Enhanced Marketing and Enhanced E-commerce packages as needed.

Cbeyond’s Enhanced Web Hosting package offers small businesses the essential tools to launch and manage their online Web presence. With this package, Cbeyond can host a company’s website, configure their domain or transfer an existing domain to the company’s Cbeyond account. Further, the design-it-yourself Web application available with this package enables small businesses to build and customize their own website by choosing from more than 200 pre-configured, easily customizable templates. The package supports flash and video files to create a rich user experience.

By adding the Enhanced Marketing package as an upgrade, Cbeyond customers can effectively target their prospects, communicate with their existing customers and drive traffic to their website. With this package, customers have the ability to quickly and easily build banner ads, register with search engines and achieve search engine optimization. Cbeyond also offers eMarketing guides to provide small businesses with best practices for managing their web site. Cbeyond’s Enhanced E-commerce package is an upgrade which allows customers to easily promote products and services online. With this package, small businesses can build an online store that accepts payment, tax and shipping information.

Customers also receive all of the Enhanced Web Hosting and Enhanced Marketing applications when they purchase this package. With enhanced applications and customer-friendly tools, Cbeyond Web Hosting is an effective and easy-to-use method for small businesses to market their company and sell their products. For more information about Cbeyond Enhanced Web Hosting and to hold an interactive demo of the Design-It-Yourself Web site Creator, visit www.cbeyond.net/services/internet-hosting.htm.

Cbeyond, Inc. (NASDAQ: CBEY - News) is a leading IP-based managed services provider that delivers integrated packages of communications and IT services to more than 40,000 small businesses throughout the United States. Cbeyond offers more than 30 productivity-enhancing applications including local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet, mobile, BlackBerry, broadband laptop access, voicemail, email, web hosting, fax-to-email, data backup, file-sharing and virtual private networking. Cbeyond manages these services over a private, 100-percent Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) facilities-based network.

To learn more about Cbeyond, please visit: www.cbeyond.net.

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Web Hosting Small Business Platform Enhancements, at Cbeyond

Armonk, New York - (The Hosting News) - January 6, 2009 - Hosted application solutions provider, IBM, has completed its tender offer for the shares of Business Rule Management System (BRMS), Optimization, Visualization, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) portfolio firm, ILOG, in the amount of approximately $340 million USD (EUR 215 million).

The tender offer, announced July 28, 2008, was finalized after IBM acquired all outstanding stock in ILOG and satisfied the other conditions of the offer. Headquartered in Paris, ILOG has more than 2,500 customers, 850 employees and operations in 30 countries around the world. The ILOG Business Rule Management System (BRMS), Optimization, Visualization, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) portfolios will build upon IBM software and business process management (BPM) leadership across a broad range of applications and environments.

Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software remarked, ”As a leader in business rules, optimization, visualization and supply chain management software, we are pleased to welcome the ILOG customers and the ILOG employees to the WebSphere family. The acquisition of ILOG is an important element within our overall SOA strategy and the key addition of the ILOG BRMS to IBM’s BPM portfolio will help IBM clients to become more dynamic. ILOG brings significant new capabilities to IBM that will provide agile, flexible applications for real-time response and confident decision-making.”

ILOG technology is anticipated to add significant capability across IBM’s software platform and the addition of BRMS will provide another dimension of leadership for the IBM BPM portfolio. This includes improved rules and business optimization for WebSphere and Information Management offerings, better visualization for WebSphere, Lotus and Tivoli products and solutions, as well as enhanced optimization and efficient supply chain management assets for planning and scheduling within a service oriented architecture (SOA).

The ILOG BRMS products help businesses increase the agility of their decision making by letting them adapt and respond dynamically. Based on applied mathematics and computer science, the ILOG optimization products allow enterprises to cope with many operating constraints. The software enables them to transform business objectives, resources and operational constraints into best possible action plans and schedules to enhance service, revenue and profits.

ILOG Visualization enhances an organization’s collaboration, role-based, and decision-making capabilities by building interactive user interfaces through diagrams, maps, schedules, charts and editors. ILOG Supply Chain Management solutions, which include Network Design, Inventory Optimization, Production Planning and Scheduling, provide an opportunity for leaner manufacturing and green supply chain management.

ILOG offers tools and technologies for business managers, analysts, architects and developers to use as they analyze, plan, track and improve business processes. Today, hundreds of large enterprises use ILOG technologies to automate the allocation of scarce resources and to build smart interfaces into their business processes. Additionally, scientists and mathematicians from hundreds of universities use ILOG products for advanced research, design, and analysis. For example, a business rule might be applied to elevate a premier customer to the front of a phone queue as part of a customer service process. ILOG’s BRMS provides users with tools that allow greater control over the criteria that determine how and when to route those premier customers.

This allows businesses to accelerate the process of initiating policy changes that may be driven by market trends or competitive activity to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained. The ease of business rule management helps reduce costs while customer satisfaction and retention translates into increased revenue. Aviva Canada Inc., a leading property and casualty insurance group, selected ILOG JRules, a key offering in the ILOG business rule management system (BRMS) product line, for use in its common service delivery platform. Based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that also includes IBM WebSphere and IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), the platform will help Aviva automate its underwriting process for personal lines and auto, reducing the carrier’s time-to-market to incorporate new or updated business policies. Aviva can implement rule changes in days or real time.

sMichael Lin, vice president e-commerce, Aviva noted, ”We selected ILOG JRules because of its ease-of-use, advanced rule management capabilities and tight integration in a service oriented architecture. Since business rules are a fundamental part of insurance processes, ILOG’s track record as a BRMS provider and the support we received were also deciding factors for us.”

ILOG will become part of the IBM WebSphere software portfolio. Consistent with IBM’s software strategy, ILOG clients’ and partners’ investments in existing IBM and ILOG technologies will be preserved, allowing customers to take advantage of the broader set of capabilities without the need to replace existing systems.

The acquisition of ILOG will strengthen IBM’s business process management (BPM) and SOA position by providing customers a broad set of rule management tools for information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform, including IBM’s leading WebSphere application development and management platform. Many of the ILOG products will also become part of IBM’s Industry Frameworks, which are integrated solutions that support industry specific business and technology standards.

Clients who use role based business spaces will now be able to take advantage of the visualization capabilities of ILOG to help improve the variety and sophistication of their views. In addition to diagramming and charting, these visualizations can be used by business space to provide more robust web-based BPM capabilities such as process modeling. With more than 7,000 client engagements worldwide, IBM is a worldwide leader in SOA and BPM. This leadership is further illustrated by a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 150 universities incorporating IBM’s SOA and BPM curricula, and more than 6,000 IBM Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices.

Data centers are the backbone of information technology (IT) infrastructure for businesses and other organizations, with powerful servers and storage systems running technology including software applications, email and web sites. IBM owns and operates more than 8 million square feet of data center space — more than any other company in the world.

With more than 7,000 client engagements worldwide, IBM is a worldwide leader in SOA and BPM. This leadership is further illustrated by a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 150 universities incorporating IBM’s SOA and BPM curricula, and more than 6,000 IBM Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices.

For more information about IBM, please visit: www.ibm.com.

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IBM Hosting Provider, Completes Acquisition of ILOG

Whether you plan to start a new online business or want to switch to a new hosting company, there are some crucial elements of hosting to consider. Business hosting must be sufficient in meeting your business needs and dependable so your site will be open to the online public at least 99.9 percent of the time. Here are some features to look for when selecting a hosting plan for your business.

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How to Find a Viable Hosting Solution For Your Online Business

Many of us today pay for web hosting from a service provider like Hostgator who kindly gives us a web server (or more correctly, a portion of a web server) to run our websites from. The hosting providers provide a whole list of tools for making it easy to administer our web servers, configure databases, add users, email, etc. With this ease of use, we sometimes forget what’s really going on under the covers. So today I wanted to cover some of the basics of web hosting and how web servers are able to run multiple websites.

What is Virtual Web Hosting?