Peake Healthcare Innovations, a leading cloud-based medical Image Management as a Service (IMaaS) solution provider, and Vital Images, Inc., a Toshiba Medical Systems Group Company and leading provider of advanced visualization and analysis solutions for healthcare providers, announced today their partnership to provide VitreaView in a Software as a Service model hosted from Peake’s secure, cloud-based PACS vendor neutral archive. The zero-footprint, zero download VitreaView universal viewer will be accessible to clinical desktops through EMR or portal integration via the PeakeSecure™ Care Enabler solution that combines cloud archiving, cross enterprise image sharing and other key features.

The partnership will enable physicians and clinicians to access large medical imaging studies almost immediately on any type of broadband connection. By hosting the viewer on Peake’s reliable cloud-based platform, providers will have access to one of the industry’s leading enterprise viewers regardless of where they are located, a necessity in today’s ever increasing healthcare environment. Healthcare institutions will benefit from the inherent value of the IMaaS delivery approach as it eliminates the need for scarce capital and resources to improve imaging department operations while gaining access to the best possible clinical tools.

“Peake Healthcare Innovations is pleased to partner with Vital Images to offer our customers this powerful option for their enterprise image viewing requirements. Being a channel for Vital’s Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery of VitreaView is compelling for customers interested in leveraging this unique solution delivery model in a capital constrained environment,” says Adam Zaricki, CEO, Peake Healthcare Innovations. “With Vital Images joining our ecosystem of secure, high-performance, choice-oriented solutions, hospitals can refocus their resources away from managing data and software back to their core competency of delivering high-quality patient care.”

Upon implementing the solution, healthcare facilities can expect to immediately benefit from an enhanced workflow that supports optimized clinical outcomes. Physicians and clinicians accessing VitreaView will see their patient’s complete medical imaging record from their EMR or Health Information Exchange via the PeakeSecure™ platform, regardless of the source of the exams, supporting faster and more informed decision making. Consequently, hospitals will be able to better address the complex challenges of managing large imaging datasets and distributing those images to clinicians throughout the enterprise.

“Healthcare organizations need an image delivery model that is both economical and efficient to support their overall Electronic Medical Record strategy. By partnering with Peake Healthcare Innovations, we are uniquely capable of providing VitreaView in a Software as a Service model that we are confident will meet these needs,” explained Erkan Akyuz, president, Vital Images. “We are forging a meaningful technology collaboration with Peake to improve healthcare delivery in today’s evolving model for care.”

The SaaS model for hosting VitreaView will be commercially available this spring. The first deployment of the solution is already scheduled to go live at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced today that it has invested in GoPago, Inc., a provider of emerging mobile payments technology. GoPago has developed a free smartphone application that allows consumers to browse, order, and pay for local goods and services. The investment, in the form of GoPago’s Series A preferred stock, will support the company’s expansion into mobile payment services by helping brick and mortar businesses modernize to better compete with online businesses.

Consumers can use GoPago to enjoy the convenience of ordering and paying for items or services with their smartphones, which accelerates service, provides exclusive deals, personalizes offers, and rewards customers for their loyalty. Businesses benefit by being able to easily set up mobile storefronts and the rich data and analytics GoPago provides helps them better target special offers to drive sales.

“Chase is committed to giving consumers and businesses a great shopping experience, leveraging the latest advances in mobile payment technologies,” said Jack Stephenson, director of mobile, e-commerce and payments at Chase. “GoPago will allow us to create powerful new value propositions for businesses and consumers. Brick and mortar businesses will be able to provide a more convenient way for their customers to shop, pay and receive targeted offers on smartphones. In addition, our relationship with GoPago will allow us to provide Chase customers exclusive rewards and offers by leveraging our strong local merchant franchise and GoPago’s data and analytics.”

Later in 2012, Chase’s customers will have the opportunity to create a free mobile storefront through GoPago, extending their reach to a broader audience and providing business tools once only afforded by large companies. In addition to the standard benefits of GoPago, Chase cardholders that use GoPago will receive exclusive offers and discounts from Chase merchants.

“Online commerce offers a number of opportunities to local business,” said Leo Rocco, CEO and founder, GoPago. “We are here to help local businesses modernize while maintaining their intimate customer experience. It’s thrilling to be partnering with a financial institution like Chase that is as equally invested in the interest of both merchants and consumers as we are. We look forward to providing Chase’s business customers with an integrated solution that removes the burden of critical business processes and frees them up to do what they’re passionate about.”

GoPago provides a secure cloud-based payment solution where all information is sent over a 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection and verified by VeriSign. All transactions are authenticated by a four-digit pin. The application is currently available for iPhone^®, Android^TM and BlackBerry^® (coming soon to Windows^® Phone 7), and is live at over 50 merchants in Mountain View, CA, and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

ASG Software Solutions today announced a partnership with Solix Technologies, a provider of enterprise data management (EDM) solutions to offer customers a comprehensive information lifecycle (ILM) solution to manage both structured and unstructured data. By providing clients with a platform approach to deploy policy based data governance strategies, the ASG/Solix partnership helps organizations not only manage on premise data, but transition to cloud based infrastructure as well.

“Managing structured data growth seems to be a forlorn hope,” said Ian Rowlands, senior director of strategy at ASG Software. “Researchers report the volume of business data to be stored is growing at a rate of 40 to 60 percent each year. The impact on budgets can be devastating. At the same time ensuring applications are handling data reliably, testing without compromising or comprehensiveness or confidentiality poses ever-growing challenges. Our partnership with Solix Technologies is an excellent complement to ASG’s recent acquisition of Atempo’s backup and archiving solutions. ASG is expanding its Data and Information Management suite to manage both structured data and unstructured data as part of ASG’s commitment to helping customers automate and simplify the management of complex IT environments, reducing risk and improving service delivery throughout the IT lifecycle.”

This partnership with Solix complements and enhances ASG’s existing data management solutions by providing customers with data privacy and data masking, test data management, archiving and application retirement solutions for packaged as well as custom database applications. Such EDM solutions improve application performance, reduce costs, provide data security and ensure long term sustainability of access to critical enterprise information. Additional features of these solutions include:

• Database Archiving: Reduce costs and improve application
  performance through policy-based information archiving and reduce
  downtime windows when upgrading to the latest version of an
  application or database.
• Test Data Management and Data Masking: Reduce the cost
  and complexity to manage enterprise applications by right sizing non
  production databases through sub setting.
• Data Privacy: Eliminate the short comings of encryption
  such as key management and performance overhead, and establish
  compliance with PCI, HIPAA and other regulatory frameworks, by masking
  non production data with syntactically intact obfuscated data.

“This strong collaboration between ASG and Solix will provide solutions to help organize, retain, and manage structured data over the long term in an optimized and secure manner – irrespective of the data source or application,” said George Symons, chief strategy officer at Solix. “These joint solutions will now enable business agility, records management, compliance and litigation support for our customers.”

“This announcement comes at a good time, considering that one-fourth of all IT organizations polled in a recent ESG Survey identified reducing the number of vendors to work with as a 2012 IT cost reduction / cost containment strategy,” said Julie Lockner, senior analyst and VP of data management at Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. “The partnership between Solix and ASG makes sense when you look at how well Solix’s products complement ASG’s existing portfolio, filling some gaps in key solution areas. This is a great opportunity for both companies.”

Safe Systems, provider of compliance-centric IT support and hosted services exclusively to financial institutions, today announced the launch of CAPS, an automated patching service to patch non-Microsoft critical applications, such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Java and QuickTime. Safe Systems’ automated service will reduce time spent manually patching all systems within the institution, and will increase security, productivity and overall compliance posture.

Danny Johnston, CEO for Safe Systems said, “In evaluating our clients’ challenges, we developed a sophisticated system to automatically patch applications like Java and Adobe to complement our current automated Microsoft patching solution. Within the first month of implementation, our internal Network Operations Center saw an almost 90 percent reduction in time spent on malware tickets.”

According to a recent report from Kaspersky Lab, Microsoft, and more specifically, Windows, is no longer the weakest link in software security. The top 10 IT security vulnerabilities included products from two vendors only, Adobe and Java. Historically, Safe Systems has written a custom install package each time Adobe or Java released an important security update. Now, CAPS scans every machine and installs the latest version of the application on any machine that is out-of-date – automatically. A report is generated providing an outline of any machine that failed to update, leaving the network administrator with a few outliers to address rather than every machine in the network. CAPS performs updates automatically, which network administrators previously had to do manually.

Darren Bridges, president for Safe Systems added, “The advantages of having up-to-date applications with an automated patching service are two-fold. There is substantial improvement in banking operations, allowing executives, tellers, loan officers and CSRs to focus on client-facing activities, which increases overall productivity. Secondly, an automated and monitored application patching service increases the institution’s security in the eyes of examiners and internal auditors, while also strengthening the bank or credit union’s vulnerability assessments. Providing our customers with a tool to test and secure every machine in their network is paramount to ensuring their systems meet and exceed regulatory expectations.”

As a very smart colleague once told me years ago, “In the future nothing will be deleted, it will just get farther and farther away.”

SpiderOak’s new Nimbus.io archival cloud storage service aims to cut costs in return for slower retrieval speed for long term storage needs. Although in beta, they have already pegged their basic charge at six cents a gigabyte.

Long term archival data is different than everyday data. It’s created in bulk, generally ignored for weeks or months with only small additions and accesses, and restored in bulk (and then often in a hurried panic!)

This access pattern means that a storage system for backup data ought to be designed differently than a storage system for general data. Designed for this purpose, reliable long term archival storage can be delivered at dramatically lower prices.

You can get a beta invite that comes with two months free storage here.

You can read more about their new offering and how it came about here.

Treeno Software, Inc. today introduced its fourth-generation Enterprise Document Management (EDM) system. Since 2002, Treeno Software has established its expertise in this $45 billion business application market with deployments in a variety of industries across North America. Its new V.4.0 platform extends Treeno’s leadership by providing businesses with greater control over all critical documents and information at a compelling price point.

Building on the strength of its platform architecture, Treeno EDM 4.0 offers a new, more intuitive user interface that makes it easier for users to leverage its numerous features. Fundamentally, it means reduced user training, increased productivity and lower cost of operations. It’s a powerful tool for businesses that costs as low as $4,995.00 for an on-premises system, or $49.95 per month for a cloud solution.

“Treeno EDM 4.0 represents the combination of more than 10 years of user analysis, together with our technical expertise in enterprise document management,” said Steve Tentindo, President, Treeno Software, Inc. “EDM is all about making workflow and operations as simple and efficient as possible. With our improved user-centered design, Treeno Software enables more people within any organization to leverage the value of this critical business application.”

According to Coopers & Lybrand, U.S. businesses generate trillions of tons of paper documents, which clog operations and limit access to critical information. Document management systems enable those documents, such as invoices, records, purchase orders, photos, titles, etc. to be digitally accessed, processed and securely retained as valuable information.

Treeno Software enables any number of departments, functional areas and disparate offices to manage and share critical information and to establish new efficiencies in workflow. Its success is marked by its robust browser-based platform that provides a wide range of functional utilities such as automated routing of reoccurring processes, content versioning, redactions and annotations, department segmenting and document control. It simplifies audit trails, eases compliance requirements and mitigates risk of exposure. It integrates quickly and easily into any size business and accommodates any number of ancillary applications that businesses rely on.

“Since 2002, our web-based architecture has provided the robust performance, security and flexibility to support today’s evolving data trends,” said Will Thibodeau, Chief Technology Officer, Treeno Software. “We have offered our clients proven IT technology with their choice of server options – local or cloud-based – and fast, easy integration.”

In addition to its new, customizable user interface, Treeno EDM 4.0 offers a variety of new features. With an enhanced file structure, Treeno has simplified the process of indexing images and documents. It also has a built-in viewer that allows hundreds of different file types to be viewed without plug-ins or additional applications on their desktop or mobile device. The new system also enables users to customize their individual dashboards, which helps employees work more effectively and comfortably.

MACH, a provider of cloud-based managed communication services, today announced that it will provide a full portfolio of roaming services to Bharti Airtel (‘Airtel’) operations across Africa. Airtel currently operates in 16 countries in Africa. With the deployment of MACH’s solutions, Airtel will be able to take a top-down consolidated view of its entire group-wide roaming business and determine group roaming strategies that will improve competitiveness.

For multi-national telecommunications groups, it is becoming increasingly vital to reduce costs and optimise revenue. One way of doing this is by closely monitoring, standardising and aligning operations of group members from the group level. MACH offers such organisations a range of business intelligence, online reporting and budget management tools that can deliver a full view of group-wide roaming businesses, providing executive management with the information they need to create strategic, group-wide roaming policies, and helping to reduce costs and grow revenues.

Manoj Kohli, CEO (International) and Joint Managing Director, Bharti Airtel, said, ”Working with MACH will allow us to be much more strategic in the way we run our roaming businesses. In addition to the anticipated cost and efficiency benefits, MACH’s dynamic reporting will allow us to offer customers roaming packages based on a greater understanding of their usage patterns across our group operations. This approach will allow us to be much more comprehensive in the way we organise our roaming business and ultimately deliver a strategy that will both benefit our customers and help us to grow revenue.”

Morten Brøgger, Chief Executive Officer, MACH, explains: ”The challenges facing group telecoms operators are very specific. They need to find ways of consolidating business intelligence – the lifeblood of any good roaming strategy – in order to have a better understanding of how their subscribers consume services when abroad, in order to consolidate their buying and selling power when negotiating with roaming partners, and in order to align performance monitoring and controls across different member companies. MACH’s business intelligence solutions will deliver Bharti Airtel with just that, allowing it to grow its operations while reducing costs through the standardisation of its roaming infrastructure.”

Amazon today announced their new Simple Workflow service, SWF for short. This new service provides the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both). Amazon Simple Workflow coordinates the flow of synchronous or asynchronous tasks.

The AWS blog said in part:

You can use Simple Workflow to handle many types of multi-stage operations including traditional business processes (handling an order or adding a new employee), setting up a complex multi-tiered application, or even handling the decision-making process for a multi-player online game.

Read the full post.

Quentin Hardy has an interesting article in the New York Times today entitled “Taser’s Latest Police Weapon: The Tiny Camera and the Cloud”

In Taser’s cloud evidence system, which resides on Amazon.com’s cloud storage service, the videos can be tagged and labeled for record-keeping. The software has editing capabilities to protect the identities of some people captured on the video, like victims of child sex crimes or undercover officers. The video cannot be deleted while in the camera, though an officer can choose when to turn his camera on and off, something Mr. Smith does not think will happen often during confrontations because the videos could help clear law-abiding officers.

The article goes on to explain that in this case using the Cloud is more than just a way to handle the challenges of IT management and cost. It’s also a way to ensure that videos that could be used as evidence are safe from tampering by any interested parties, including the police themselves.

Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc., and Crossroads Systems, Inc.  formed a strategic alliance for FFNA to sell a branded Fujitsu-Crossroads StrongBox tier-3 data vault.

Fujitsu and its extensive worldwide channel now offer “StrongBox powered by Fujitsu” within their NuVola Private Cloud PlatformTM solution. StrongBox is a tier-3 data storage solution that provides online, all-the-time random file access that reduces costs by up to 90 percent. It stands as the industry’s most cost-effective answer to ever-growing data storage requirements. The NuVola Private Cloud Platform is Fujitsu’s appliance-based solution built with class-leading Fujitsu storage and server products, and paired with advanced software tools and utilities that transform business critical processes by leveraging private cloud computing power, security and scalability.

StrongBox powered by Fujitsu will also provide organizations the first enterprise-level private cloud solution that leverages Linear Tape File System (LTFS) technology, combining the unparalleled scalability of tape with the speed and accessibility of disk.

“The StrongBox powered by Fujitsu appliance breaks new ground in the category of tier-3 data storage by providing class-leading performance, administration and management that utilizes LTFS,” said Vic Herring, vice president of sales and marketing at FFNA. “StrongBox offers immediate ROI for organizations whose tier-3 storage strategy must meet high-performance requirements, be agile enough to seamlessly scale, all while being deployed on our NuVola Private Cloud Platform.”

“Crossroads is extremely pleased to announce its strategic alliance with Fujitsu, one of the world’s top IT companies,” said Rob Sims, president and CEO of Crossroads Systems. “With an organization the size of Fujitsu offering and utilizing StrongBox, it underscores the solution’s unique capabilities and the impact it can have within the industry. By integrating StrongBox within Fujitsu’s portfolio, we significantly expand the possibilities of how tier-3 data is managed using the LTFS standard, all while reducing cost and increasing the reliability of data vaults.”