PRESS RELEASE

Cisco and CTM Collaborate at Macau Cloud Solution Day Showcasing the New Era of Cloud Computing

Cisco Introduces CloudVerse to Address Growing Importance of Cloud Computing

MACAU & HONG KONG, March 23, 2012 – At the Macau Cloud Solution Day, held today at the Grand Hyatt Macau, Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, and CTM, Macau's leading telecom operator, further collaborated to unveil new cloud computing technologies, bringing an upsurge in innovation to the information technology (IT) industry. Themed "New Era of Cloud Computing", the event marked the launch of Cisco® CloudVerse and the furthering of the collaboration between CTM and Cisco with the preview of CTM's new cloud-based value-added services – the Cloud Infrastructure Service and "Business Talk" Unified Communication Service – facilitating Macau's march towards a new era of cloud computing.

The cloud is dramatically transforming business IT and consumer services. In the inaugural Cisco Global Cloud Index(2010-2015), Cisco estimates global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from 130 exabytes to reach a total of 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015 – the equivalent of 22 trillion hours of streaming music or 1.6 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming. The study also predicts that over 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will be cloud-based by 2014. Cloud is becoming a critical element for the future of IT, and in addressing today's business demands for agility, continuity and security amid a dynamic economic ecosystem.

Cisco CloudVerse, a framework that combines the foundational elements needed to enable organizations to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds, can address the growing importance of cloud computing. It responds to the prevalence of cloud computing in a world of many clouds. CloudVerse combines three key cloud elements – Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services – enabling businesses to realize all of the benefits of the cloud: improved agility, better economics, enhanced security and a dynamic, assured experience. 

Core Elements of Cisco CloudVerse:

Unified Data Center changes the economics of the cloud infrastructure by providing a fabric-based platform automating the "as a service" model across physical and virtual environments, and is designed to scale with business demands by flexibly allocating resources within and between data centers using unified computing and unified fabric.

Cloud Intelligent Network provides a consistent and highly secure user experience wherever the user is located and across the multiple clouds involved in delivering an application or service.

Cloud Applications and Services enable "as a service" delivery of both Cisco and third-party cloud applications.

"With CloudVerse, Cisco is committed to helping businesses accelerate their cloud success and realize the full potential of the cloud. We look forward to working closely with CTM on its journey to the cloud as a progression from our long-term collaboration," said Barbara Chiu, general manager, Cisco Hong Kong and Macau. "Cisco uniquely enables the world of many clouds – connecting people, communities and organizations with a business-class cloud user experience for the next-generation Internet. This next step in our collaboration will empower CTM and Macau's transition to the new era of cloud computing."

With Cisco's innovative technologies and extensive experience in cloud computing and CTM's well-established high-speed network facilities, CTM's cloud based value-added services – Cloud Infrastructure Service and "Business Talk" Unified Communication Service – were introduced and showcased in a live demonstration session at today's event.

"CTM is excited about this further solid collaboration with Cisco. We believe Cisco is the top provider in the industry which caters to our cloud computing needs, dynamically scaling IT resources and making applications and services easier than ever to access," said Vandy Poon, chief executive officer, CTM. "The strengths of both parties create an effective synergy which makes possible the development of cloud based value-added services, continuing to help businesses develop effective strategies for rapid business expansion and supporting the rapid economic development of Macau."

Cloud Infrastructure Service

Powered by the Cisco Unified Communication System™ (Cisco UCS™) and Cisco Nexus® switches, the Cloud Infrastructure Service represents a new consumption model for the use of IT resources, with network, storage and computing resources delivered in a virtualized environment as a service.

Flexible delivery of resources. The Cloud Infrastructure Service enables a resource pooling infrastructure, with dynamic on-demand utility based characteristics and highly flexible management. The pooled IT resources can be flexibly scaled up or down on demand to better align with current and future business needs. The service enables businesses to connect to the required computing resources in a very short amount of time, anytime and anywhere. The hassle of purchasing and deploying computing resources in a traditional approach with long lead time is now eliminated.

Reduced operational cost. By purchasing a compute capability "as a service", the Cloud Infrastructure Service reduces up-front capital investment in computing infrastructure and ongoing hardware upgrade and maintenance expenses including electricity and cooling expenses. The on-demand model allows businesses to purchase the required compute capability based on service consumed and data volume. This is particularly beneficial for SMBs as they can access a business-grade IT infrastructure with a simple monthly subscription plan.

"Business Talk" Unified Communication Service

With CTM's cloud service platform and Cisco Unified Communications Manager and full-featured Cisco IP Phone, the upcoming "Business Talk" service is an intelligent, enterprise-grade business telephony solution designed to address the sophisticated communications needs of today's businesses. The new service provides a unified business communication and collaboration experience that delivers voice services via multiple devices including business phones, desktop computers, notebooks and smartphones.

Enhanced mobility and business efficiency. Apart from the traditional telephony features, the "Business Talk" service provides HD voice, fixed-mobile convergence and mobility extension capabilities, which address the demand for high connectivity with greater mobility. Utilizing one single number, the service enables businesses to extend business voice to mobile phones and a unified communications platform. Users can also extend their mobility and save on roaming charges when calling from overseas via a Wi-Fi connected mobile device. "Business Talk" is a cost-effective, cross-platform unified communications service with distinctive capabilities, which helps facilitate business communications and collaboration.

Supporting Resources

• Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010-2015) Infographic
• Cisco Global Cloud Index YouTube Animation
• Cisco Global Cloud Index Forecast and Methodology, 2010-2015 white paper

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News Release from Cisco - Unified Computing System

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PRESS RELEASE

New Cisco Unified Computing System Innovations Help Customers Build Clouds, Deploy Business Applications Faster

Additions to Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio quadruple memory capacity, double switching capacity and simplify management for large-scale UCS deployments

Related Information

Cisco Unified Computing System customer adoption and data center transformation infographic

Cisco Unified Computing System

Data Sheet

Cisco Unified Computing System Fact Sheet

SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 8, 2012 – IT organizations today are striving to establish data centers that support virtualization and cloud computing to become more competitive and agile, reduce the cost of physical infrastructure, and support the demands of data growth andBig Data analytics.  Cisco today announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System™ to deliver a third-generation fabric computing platform– which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management– to address these challenges and help customers respond rapidly to changing business needs, scale their data centers, and accelerate transition to virtualization andcloud computing.

The Cisco UCS™ third-generation fabric computing platform incorporates the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family and includes multiple server form factors delivering the industry's highest server density and efficiency, with up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. The Cisco UCS Manager now allows IT administrators to manage both blade and rack servers as a common entity, and extends the management domain to span thousands of servers across data centers around the world.

UCS customers report dramatic operational and cost improvements up to: 30 percent lower infrastructure expenses, 90 percent reduction in deployment times, 40 percent improvements in application performance, and 60 percent reductions in power/cooling costs.

News Highlights

Unified Management with Cisco UCS

• Through enhanced integration with Cisco Unified Fabrictechnology, Cisco UCS Manager now unifies management for both blade and rack servers within a single domain. This industry-first capability reduces the cost of server connectivity, provides resource flexibility, and allows IT administrators to add data center capacity without additional complexity.
• In the second half of 2012, Cisco will introduce technology to support large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for multiple UCS domains, spanning thousands of servers either in a single data center or spread across data centers around the world, providing industry-leading automation and orchestration for cloud environments.

Cisco UCS Integrated Networking and Virtualization

• The chassis I/O module 2204XP provides options for 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each chassis to handle workload bursts. The module also offers port channeling, which allows load balancing across all ports to improve efficiency and resiliency through higher link utilization and bandwidth.
• The Cisco UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect doubles the switching capacity of the UCS fabric (from 960Gbps to 1.92Tbps) and reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent to deliver industry-leading application performance. The fabric interconnect provides infrastructure agility at scale with unified ports and greater energy efficiency, lowering watts per port by 36 percent.  
• The Cisco UCS 6200 Series combined with the Cisco Nexus® Fabric Extender extends Cisco UCS Manager benefits to larger scale UCS deployments for both blade and rack form factors.

New M3 Generation Unified Computing System Servers 
Cisco broadens the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio with one blade and two rack-mount servers based on the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600. Available in March, Cisco's new server lineup improves workload delivery with enhanced performance, flexibility, and efficiency to support increasing data center demands. With more cores, cache, memory capacity, and internal storage and faster communication pathways to move data more quickly, Cisco UCS with the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 offers the industry's best performance, power efficiency, features, and cost.

• Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:  The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M3 server provides performance, versatility, and density in a half-blade form factor, delivering balanced, industry-leading density through its 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. Greater density, performance and bandwidth mean business applications can run faster, more cost-effectively, and more efficiently.    
• UCS C220 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a one-rack-unit (1RU) server designed for performance and density for a wide range of business workloads, from Web services to distributed databases.
• UCS C240 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a two-rack-unit (2RU) server designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration.

Application Performance Leadership

• Since Cisco UCS was introduced in 2009, it has captured 63 industry benchmark world records. With industry-leading application performance and a rapid, automated configuration model that speeds the deployment of applications, UCS makes performance predictable and increases business productivity. Cisco UCS is the ideal platform to support databases, Big Data, virtualization software, Java applications, HPC applications, and Web services. 

Cisco Unified Computing System Industry Adoption

• Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers. Cisco UCS provides far greater benefits than simple convergence by unifying the compute, networking, virtualization, storage access, and management software as an integrated system to provide superior data center design flexibility and remove management barriers between blade and rack servers across bare metal, virtualized, and private/public cloud environments. Unifying data centers in this way allows customers to deploy business applications more rapidly, enhance revenue streams, introduce new business models, and grow their businesses while reducing IT costs.
• With approximately $5.8 billion in annual R&D spending, Cisco continues to innovate, driving data center transformation and helping businesses establish cloud computing environments more rapidly and cost-effectively. Cisco® Cloud Enablement Services, a comprehensive range of cloud professional and technical services, together with the Cisco CloudVerse architecture (which includes Unified Data Center technologies like UCS, intelligent networking, and applications working together), help customers build private, public or hybrid clouds; More than 70 percent of the top 50 public cloud providers deploy UCS.
• Cisco also collaborates with industry leaders like BMC Software, CA, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems,Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VCE, and VMware, on developing data center solutions that ease deployment and management of data center infrastructure and take the risk out of solution planning and speed deployment.

Supportive Quotes

Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, SunGard Availability Services

"The conversation around cloud today has changed from 'if' to 'how', and IT organizations are trying to figure out how to use the cloud for running tier-1 production applications," said Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President Products and Chief Technology Officer at SunGard Availability Services. "An enterprise-grade cloud service such as SunGard's, built and delivered on pre-integrated, premium infrastructure such as Cisco UCS and VBlock from VCE, is critical to making cloud ready for production. The pre-integration of compute and networking in VBlock, combined with open standards and customizable service profiles, enables virtual data centers to be spun up on short notice and provides a level of business agility without sacrificing application availability."

Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive

"As the second-largest privately owned dealership group in the United States, we experienced server and desktop sprawl that required a more manageable, cost-effective unified data center approach, and we chose shared infrastructure FlexPod, with unique integration management of UCS and NetApp unified storage, as the best solution for our private cloud infrastructure," said Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive. It used to take weeks to deploy a new business application, but now we can do it in a day.  Now senior management views IT as a business enabler that significantly increases our business agility."

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst ZK Research

"Companies are not using the same networking gear they were a few years ago, so why should they use the same servers," said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst  at ZK Research. Customers are not averse to change if the benefits are high enough.  Cisco built UCS with virtual and cloud computing in mind and now its competitors are trying to catch up. And Cisco has an especially strong offering now with its latest advances in fabric computing and enhancements to UCS Manager."

Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco

"Our customers care most about time-to-deploy business applications, application performance and unified management of bare metal, virtualized and private/public cloud environments," said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco. "Cisco pioneered fabric computing and service profiles – still not duplicated by any other vendor- which allow IT managers to deploy applications in minutes instead of days. Now with innovations in UCS Manager their integrated management spans rack and blade servers, and scales across data centers to thousands of servers globally.  Our open system allows for structured integration with partner and customer solutions, making the Cisco UCS and the Unified Data Center a strong foundation  for rapid deployment, performance, scalability, and ease of management."

Supportive Resources:

• Learn more about Cisco Unified Computing
• Read more: Cisco UCS Industry Benchmarks and Application Performance Records
• View Cisco UCS industry awards
• View UCS customer success videos and case studies

• Read Cisco Data Center blog
• Cisco Data Center Social Media
• Cisco Data Center Services website
• Follow Cisco on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.  Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go tohttp://newsroom.cisco.com.

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Shift in Enterprise Cloud Adoption

IBM Addresses Next Shift in Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Study finds nearly 90 percent of businesses are moving beyond virtualization
New IBM SmartCloud software advances visibility, control and automation across cloud and traditional environments
IBM extends secure cloud management to Mobile devices and physical assets

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PULSE -- LAS VEGAS - 06 Mar 2012: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new software that represents a significant advancement in the level of visibility, control and automation for organizations to securely manage and deploy cloud services.

A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years.  As organizations take the next step beyond virtualized data centers and expand their cloud environments, they are faced with what has become known as “virtual image sprawl.”  

Virtual images are typically between five to 20 gigabytes in size. Multiply that by the thousands of virtual images created today, with larger enterprises having five to twenty thousand virtual machines, making it costly and challenging for IT managers who are tasked with improving service levels. 

“Virtual images are tripling every two years, outpacing the doubling in compute power and essentially flat IT budgets. With current operating practices, every two years, you'd need 1.5 times the physical infrastructure to support cloud and twice the labor. That's an unsustainable cost and management problem which is the exact opposite of the promise of cloud," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. “We are delivering a much higher level of control over cloud service delivery allowing our customers to quickly, easily and affordably move to higher levels of value beyond virtualization.” 

IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings allow organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with a higher level of control than previously available in the industry. Collectively, the new offerings will help clients speed delivery, lower risk and better control the move to deploy cloud alongside their existing production environments. 

Increasing Speed  

IBM is offering clients great value and flexibility by delivering best practice cloud services. Since deploying IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, Dutch Cloud has seen its client base expand significantly. However, the high degree of automation built into the IBM solution has greatly reduced Dutch Cloud’s administrative workload.  

Now the IT team spends 80 percent of its time on client migrations and only 20 percent of its time on administration—a more than 70 percent decrease in administrative time. Dutch Cloud’s monthly recurring revenue has tripled twice in the last six months but their operational costs have remained flat. 

“With our original tool, it could take almost an hour to provision an extra 200 virtual machines for a client,” says Martijn Van Zoeren, CEO, Dutch Cloud. “With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, we can do it within five minutes. Previously, we had to keep changing our tool to support all new versions of VMware, KVM and Microsoft software coming out, and all the new storage versions,” added Van Zoeren. “It was easy to do that when we first started, but we couldn’t maintain it as we grew. We were spending 80 percent of our time maintaining the tool and 20 percent on supporting client requirements.” 

With IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, new services also can be deployed in minutes rather than hours. This places Dutch Cloud in an ideal position to respond rapidly to fluctuating client needs. The IaaS market is going to continue to mature and we’ll see more competition in the coming years. Our technology choices have given us the ability to thrive in this competitive market.” 

Improving Quality

As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realize agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around their development, test and deployment operations. SunTrust bank is working with IBM’s DevOps solution to increase their business agility while increasing operational discipline, quality, customer satisfaction and governance. Utilizing a cloud environment, SunTrust developers have been able to achieve application build times up to five times faster. 

Building on that and other experiences with clients, IBM will be releasing new capabilities with IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery. The new software is a suite of best practice patterns for enabling integrated lifecycle management of cloud services, combining Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management solutions with IBM SmartCloud Provsioning. The recent Green Hat acquisition will further extend these capabilities reducing development lifecycle times by streamlining test cycles as applications are transitioned to cloud deployments. 

Clients using the software have seen dramatic results, including: 

·   Shortened delivery time from months to days through end-to-end automation, standardization and repeatability 

·   20 percent reduction in resource costs while increasing predictability of deployments through low touch and self-service 

·   40 percent more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication 

·   20 percent increases in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder alignment of development, test and ops

Reducing Risk, Controlling Complexity

Enterprises view cloud computing as a way to improve responsiveness and change the economics of IT. At the same time, the envelope of IT is stretching way beyond the data center, networks and workstations to new classes of mobile assets with embedded intelligence. 

Clients need to exert the same control over this virtualized, distributed world as they would exert over prior models of IT. In order to address this IBM has launched new offerings, including: 

· IBM SmartCloud Control Desk provides organizations the ability to maintain configuration integrity in response to planned changes and unplanned incidents and problems occuring across a complex IT landscape to ensure continuity of service, speed of response, and efficiency of management.  

· IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices helps firms better manage and secure their mobile environments, including iPhone, iPad, Android-based phones and tablets, Windows Phone and Nokia Symbian devices. With the ability to install in minutes, organizations will quickly be able to remotely set policies, monitor employees’ devices to identify potential data compromise and wipe data off the devices if they are lost or stolen.  

By leveraging key innovations in cloud environment capacity analytics, storage utilization and optimization, operations teams can shift their focus from managing environment bottlenecks to delivering innovative best of breed services. IBM is offering:

· IBM SmartCloud Monitoring enables cloud administrators to maximize cloud availability and utilization by monitoring virtual infrastructures and applying analytics to optimize workload placement.

· IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center improves the flexibility, cost, utilization and performance of storage with automated administration, management and provisioning controls.

About IBM Cloud Computing

IBM has helped thousands of clients adopt cloud models and manages millions of cloud based transactions every day. IBM assists clients in areas as diverse as banking, communications, healthcare and government to build their own clouds or securely tap into IBM cloud-based business and infrastructure services. IBM is unique in bringing together key cloud technologies, deep process knowledge, a broad portfolio of cloud solutions, and a network of global delivery centers. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visithttp://www.ibm.com/smartcloud.  Follow us on Twitter at @ibmcloud.

AT&T's "Virtual Cloud"

News Release from AT&T:


Introducing AT&T's "Virtual Private Cloud"

New AT&T Cloud Capability with VMware Brings Together Industry Leaders in Virtual Private Networking and Cloud Infrastructure

Dallas, Texas, February 13, 2012


Business cloud computing users will take note: the power of AT&T’s “virtual private cloud” has arrived.

AT&T* today announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a ServiceSM with VMware vCloud® Datacenter Service.

The new enterprise-class cloud service combines technologies from virtual private networking (VPN) industry leader AT&T1 and cloud infrastructure software industry leader VMware.

Like AT&T’s other cloud offers, this new cloud capability is embedded directly into its network. This means compute and storage services can be scaled, managed, routed and delivered to business customers, down to virtually any fixed or mobile device, quickly and flexibly, on demand, with enterprise-grade security and performance.

The service allows VMware’s more than 350,000 customers to extend their private clouds across and into AT&T’s network-based cloud using AT&T’s industry leading VPN. The benefits of this “virtual private cloud” include the flexibility and cost efficiencies of using private and public cloud systems interchangeably and strategically.

The service allows users to rapidly provision and scale compute resources and easily and flexibly shift workloads between their private clouds and AT&T’s network-based cloud.  It also supports bursting, data center extensions, disaster recovery, and mobile application development and deployment.

“Our new cloud offer with VMware can help customers simplify the way they orchestrate their cloud resources between private and public clouds, allowing them to have the best of both worlds,” said John Potter, VP, As a Service Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions.

Concur, a leading cloud provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions, uses AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service for its disaster recovery capabilities. The company, which has virtualized almost 80% of its IT environment over the last three years with VMware cloud infrastructure software, expects AT&T’s new Synaptic Compute as a Service to allow it rapid access to compute capability in the event of an outage in its primary network.

“We see the combination of AT&T’s VPN-based cloud service with VMware’s virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies as an optimum pairing that will speed our ability to shift computing workloads between private and public clouds efficiently and effectively,” said Stephen deRham, Sr. VP of R&D, Concur Technologies, Inc.

The offer is a new version of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a ServiceSM. AT&T has achieved certification according to VMware’s rigorous standards for its vCloud Datacenter Service program which was created to ensure globally consistent enterprise-class cloud computing infrastructure services. It is available immediately in the U.S. with global availability expected by year-end 2012.

“AT&T’s participation in the VMware vCloud® Datacenter Services program creates a new cloud offer for our customers that harnesses the security, performance and reliability of AT&T’s network-based cloud with the industry-leading VMware vCloud platform that is the standard datacenter environment for our enterprise customers,” said Dan Chu, Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure and Services, VMware.

The new version of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service signals AT&T’s most recent advance in the execution of its strategy to deliver cloud services that meet the needs of a wide variety of users including large and medium enterprises, developers, and internet-centric businesses. This new service is complemented by a series of cloud offers announced by AT&T in the last 90 days which includes:

AT&T Unified Communications Services: news release; sign up here
AT&T Cloud Architect: news release; sign up here
AT&T Platform as a Service: news release; sign up here
AT&T’s portfolio of cloud services also includes AT&T Synaptic Storage as a ServiceSM, and AT&T Synaptic HostingSM.

1 AT&T is the market-leading VPN provider according to Vertical Systems Group – ENS (Emerging Networks Service), ‘Dedicated IP VPN Services Market, 2010 U.S. Services Site Share’, March 2011)

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

VMware and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

Startups Offered Up to $60K in Cloud Services on Windows

News release from Microsoft:

News Press Release

TechStars and Microsoft BizSpark Team Up to Offer Startups $60,000 in Cloud Services on Windows Azure

TechStars taps Microsoft BizSpark Plus to give startups a head start.

BOULDER, Colo. — Jan. 30, 2012 — TechStars, recently recognized as the No. 1 startup accelerator in the world, and Microsoft Corp. are working together to help startups fast-track their businesses. TechStars today announced an enhanced relationship with Microsoft through the new BizSpark Plus program for accelerators and incubators. The enhanced program allows TechStars accelerators in Boulder, Colo.; Boston; New York; Seattle; and Texas to offer each of their startups up to $60,000 (U.S.) of Windows Azure compute and storage over a 24-month period, at no cost. BizSpark Plus is an extension of the Microsoft BizSpark program, designed to accelerate the success of startups around the world. BizSpark Plus works through select incubators and accelerators such as TechStars to provide value-added products and services to high-potential startups. In addition to offering this to TechStars, Microsoft is making this offer available to all founders whose accelerator is part of the Global Accelerator Network, a network of nearly 40 high-quality accelerators from around the world that follow a model similar to TechStars. “Our passion is helping startups succeed around the world by providing funding and mentorship from the best and brightest Internet entrepreneurs and investors on the planet. The enhanced relationship with Microsoft will allow us to provide our founders with even more valuable support and services,” said David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars. “Access to technologies such as Windows Azure and other software and services from Microsoft through the BizSpark Plus program gives our companies a leg up in the all-encompassing race to scale and succeed.” TechStars has a wealth of experience working with tech startups around the world that are building products and services in the cloud. Cloud applications and smart devices are driving the new startup ecosystem, affording startups the ability to drive user adoption, scale their companies and generate financial returns with far less capital and much more quickly than ever before. Windows Azure offers a simple, comprehensive and powerful platform for the creation of Web applications and services. “TechStars is a great partner with a proven track record of attracting world-class startups. We are excited at the opportunity to work together to help startups when they need it most, with the products, resources and connections they need the most,” said Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president, Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Microsoft. “Working with entrepreneurs on the forefront of the cloud revolution is especially rewarding. Windows Azure is a powerful, integrated platform, making it easy for startups to get their services up and running quickly with minimal overhead. This is the first offer from our new BizSpark Plus program, and we look forward to supporting TechStars members across a number of markets and technology offerings.” About TechStars TechStars (www.techstars.com) is an elite mentorship-driven start-up accelerator, recently recognized as the No. 1 accelerator program. Founded in 2006, the TechStars philosophy focuses on deep mentorship, and surrounding a small number of companies with highly engaged members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to coach and support them to success. The TechStars community currently includes more than 300 mentors, more than 1,500 investors and over 120 alumni TechStars companies. TechStars currently operates five programs each year in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, Texas, and New York. TechStars is funded by more than 50 venture capital firms and 25 angel investors. Information on applying to TechStars can be found at www.techstars.com/apply. About Global Accelerator Network The Global Accelerator Network (www.joingan.com) consists of almost 40 high quality independently owned and operated organizations from around the world that utilize a mentorship-based startup accelerator model. It provides networking opportunities, training, special perks, and ongoing support for members of the network. TechStars led the effort to form the Global Accelerator Network in 2010 as part of the White House’s Startup America Initiative. In the spirit of supporting more entrepreneurs around the world, the Network’s mission is to ensure that 5,000 successful and experienced entrepreneurs and investors will mentor and support 6,000 promising young entrepreneurs. The goal is to increase their success rate tenfold and create 25,000 new jobs by 2015 as well as a sustained engine for growing these figures over time. About Microsoft BizSpark Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps software startups succeed. With more than 45,000 startups from 100 countries in the program and a global network of 2,300 BizSpark partners, Microsoft provides great business value to young technology companies around the world. The program provides a wide range of Microsoft technology, technical and business expertise, and enhanced market visibility. BizSpark Plus is an extension of the foundational BizSpark program, providing higher-value offerings through a network of leading regional incubators and accelerators around the world. More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark. About Microsoft Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.