21 Hot Midmarket Products Seen At MES East 2013

Build IT For A Midmarket Win

Many of today's leading tech vendors are focusing their efforts on producing IT solutions specifically for the IT directors and tech-savvy line-of-business executives at midmarket companies. The midmarket is on the pulse of innovation and continues to outpace the average national revenue growth, according to the recent middle market indicator released by The National Center for the Middle Market, so it is definitely an area that IT vendors should be paying close attention to.

Here we present 21 products aimed at helping midmarket IT executives drive innovation as seen at the Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES) East 2013, which is being held from April 28-May 1 in Chicago.

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AirWatch

AirWatch is emphasizing its enterprise mobility management capabilities, which include integrated or standalone approaches to device management and app wrapping, as well as its Secure Content Locker, said Ed Dynis, an AirWatch account executive. "AirWatch is the most comprehensive solution for enterprise mobility management because of our cross-platform strategic approach that allows IT administrators to centrally deploy, secure, monitor, manage and support corporate and employee-liable mobile devices across all major operating systems," said Dynis. At MES East, AirWatch is discussing how mobile apps and devices are integrating with existing IT infrastructures, and the most secure ways to manage corporate content.

ATEN Technology

ATEN Technology is introducing its innovative command center solution, according to Chris Hsu, a sales engineer at ATEN. The new solution includes a dynamic 4-port KVM that allows operators to control, access and monitor four servers on one display in realtime. ATEN also plans to present its line of green ECO-PDUs for intelligent energy and data center environmental management. "ATEN is ready to blow some midmarket minds, and we're doing so with a ferocious combination of value and innovative technology," said Hsu.

Auxis

Auxis offers near-shore business process outsourcing and information technology outsourcing solutions, and is presenting its management consulting offerings at MES. "Our hands-on management consulting business provides business advisory services focused on business strategy, performance improvement, business transformation and mergers and acquisition support, with target areas of expertise that include finance and accounting, supply chain and IT," said Auxis CIO Alvaro Prieto. Auxis also offers a full range of IT services, including IT strategy, IT service management, application management and development, infrastructure management and emerging technologies, such as cloud.

BP Logix

BP Logix is presenting its predictive business process management (BPM) solutions, which automate and streamline business processes. It is specifically presenting its Process Director software, which encompasses workflow, document management, lifecycle management and collaboration with a strong understanding of both business and IT roles. "Process Director, with its process timeline technology, is the first and only software product that incorporates the dimension of time within BPM," explained Marti Colwell, vice president of marketing and business development at BP Logix. "To stay ahead of the competition, midmarket companies need to maximize their resources while also leveraging new technologies, and BPM promotes business effectiveness and efficiency, enabling companies to do more with less," said Colwell.

Dell SecureWorks

Dell SecureWorks is presenting its new midsize enterprise incident response retainer, according to its midmarket director and security evangelist, Jeff Multz. This service offers rapid and thorough response to threats, which is essential to safeguarding critical systems and data. Dell SecureWorks' security experts provide emergency incident response services within minutes of a reported security breach. "Our entire approach to security services specialization is understanding and predicting future threats. We are uniquely positioned from the inception of our company for the midsize enterprise segment, unlike other companies that were always enterprise-focused and are trying to climb down into the midmarket space," said Multz.

Domo

Domo is showcasing its cloud-based executive management platform, which, according to Steve Wellen, COO and vice president of client services at Domo, "redefines the way midmarket companies think about business intelligence." Domo brings together, in one view, relevant data from multiple data sources and optimizes it for end-user consumption. "By enabling self-service BI, we reduce the strain on IT," Wellen said. Domo is looking forward to sharing how it is helping midmarket companies transform the way business is managed by taking data out of silos and making it directly accessible to end users.

Eaton

During MES East, Eaton is focusing on its newly redesigned software platform, which will help midmarket customers manage and monitor their existing and future data center designs, according to Curtiz Gangi, director of IT sales at Eaton. It also is talking about Eaton's new server and storage partnerships and how well it integrates into their solutions. Finally, Eaton is covering how it has expanded its reach into the virtualization world, ensuring that its products and solutions work well with many of the virtualized environments running today. "Virtualization is bringing higher and higher processor utilization to the data center, increasing the business importance and criticality of each physical server, and Eaton is focused on safeguarding this increasingly important physical infrastructure through automation, integration and control," Gangi said.

Exablox

Exablox's company vision is to enable midsize organizations to manage, protect and access the information critical to their businesses. Since its founding in 2011, Exablox has been working with its midmarket customers and partners to address their storage pain points, according to Douglas Brockett, CEO. "We have found that runaway costs, complicated installation, cumbersome management and lack of data security are the primary issues not being addressed by current storage solutions," he said. Accordingly, Exablox is taking a clean-sheet approach by developing an innovative cloud-managed scale-out storage solution for businesses' valuable unstructured data, which it will be presenting at MES East along with some exciting news about its offerings.

Halo Business Intelligence

"At MES East, Halo is demonstrating Halo Business Intelligence, a newly introduced BI platform designed to leverage a midsize enterprise's most valuable asset, its people," said Halo's CEO Ray Major. What differentiates Halo from its competitors is that it offers a number of unique features, including integrated data quality tools that catch and correct problems such as missing, inaccurate and incomplete information on the fly. "We use MES as a product focus group as much as an opportunity to present our products. Halo BI was largely developed based on input from past MES attendees and, as such, we're looking forward to hearing what challenges midsize enterprises are facing in the coming year and seeing how we can further refine the Halo BI platform to help meet them," said Major.

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Hosting

Hosting, which builds and operates high-performance clouds for business-critical applications, is presenting Hosting Managed Cloud Services, a portfolio optimized specifically for midsize enterprises. "Building on our managed cloud foundation services, we offer a unique lifecycle approach accompanied by solutions such as Hosting Disaster Recovery, Hosting Security and Hosting Compliance Services, all bolstered by a strong set of professional services to fill the gaps between the business-critical applications that midsize enterprises manage," said Bill Santos, executive vice president of enterprise solutions at Hosting. Santos said that Hosting is excited to be at MES to share open and honest conversations with the midmarket IT executive attendees to better understand their business challenges, and share how Hosting can help.

HP/Intel

HP/Intel is focused on helping IT set the pace for business and helping midmarket CIOs innovate for success. HP/Intel is focusing on three big infrastructure trends: converged infrastructure, cloud, and software defined data centers. "We want to make sure that going forward, one individual can do the work of a fleet of people. Software defined data center is a massive part of innovation for midsize business today," said Aaron Mills, vice president of U.S. midsize commercial sales for HP, during his keynote address at MES. HP/Intel is talking about its ProLiant Gen8 servers with Intel Xeon Processors and how its integrated reliability and security features help maintain the availability of midmarket IT executives' data and applications.

LifeSize

The LifeSize Icon Series, a revolutionary video conferencing solution, was launched in early 2013, and LifeSize is showing it off live in both its boardroom presentations and on the show floor at MES East. LifeSize Icon has enabled video conferencing to become a viable technology to be mass deployed by midmarket organizations for both internal use and as part of a supply-chain solution. "Coupling that with the fantastic quality and radically simplified user experience, LifeSize video communications solutions is moving the industry into a whole new world of communication," said Simon Dudley, LifeSize video evangelist. MES attendees will have the opportunity to learn, and see for themselves, how the LifeSize Icon has been implemented in thousands of organizations and how it could change visual communication within their organizations.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Jane Boulware, vice president and general manager of its U.S. Windows Commercial business, gave a keynote address to end the first day of MES on Sunday, April 28. She showed off Windows 8, Microsoft's newest operating system, and how it addresses many of the technology needs and budget challenges midmarket organizations are facing today. "It's not a ’for' solution, it's an ’and' solution," Boulware said. It offers no-compromise business tablets, new possibilities in mobile productivity, enhanced end-to-end security, virtualization and device management. It also presents Microsoft DirectAccess and automatic VPN, which, according to Boulware, is the ultimate win-win because it's easy for the user and reduces help desk costs for IT. Lastly, the security provisions address all malware concerns before they happen. "We at Microsoft are rethinking devices for all levels of enterprise," Boulware exclaimed.

NEC

NEC Enterprise Platform Solutions has a long track record of dealing with all sizes of enterprise but, of late, has found that its offerings -- from analog PBX to IP telephony, unified communications and cloud-based management of information and communications technology -- are uniquely positioned for the midmarket, based on the scope of the solutions and price points they offer, according to Kevin Hooper, the recently appointed senior vice president of NEC's Enterprise Platform Solutions business and long-time MES veteran. "We want to focus on the core business issues that CIOs are dealing with, which are around optimizing service levels, creating predictability in the operating expense model and building a road map that's credible," said Hooper. "We have all of the offerings in place to help CIOs address these challenges."

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Ruckus Wireless

At MES East, Ruckus Wireless unveiled its new BYOD capabilities, such as automatic, device-based policy enforcement, along with a completely new range of Smart Wi-Fi access points. "We are differentiated from our competitors through our patented and adaptive antenna array technology that uniquely increases the range, reliability and performance of Wi-Fi networks," said David Callisch, Ruckus' vice president of corporate marketing. "Being at MES, we look forward to understanding how the requirements of midmarket CIOs are evolving within the quickly changing network-computing environment that is being driven by new devices, applications and mobility requirements today," he continued.

SAS

"At MES East, SAS is presenting SAS Visual Analytics, its newest offering that enables midmarket organizations to visually explore their data to better understand what the data means, execute analytic computations within minutes, and deliver results where and when they need it," said Kevin Garabedian, senior director of SAS SMB solutions. The company contends that SAS Visual Analytics is the only solution in the market that combines data visualization and reporting with both descriptive and predictive analytics to provide users a forward-looking view of their business. It also integrates with Microsoft Office, and the June release of Visual Analytics will further enable self-sufficiency in business users.

Scale Computing

"When I started Scale Computing six years ago, we looked to answer one fundamental question: if we were to build an IT infrastructure specifically for midsized companies from the ground up, without any preconceived notions of what had to be there, what would it look like?" said Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing during the quick fire session at MES. "Now, six years and nearly 20 technology patents later, we have launched a product called HC3, which is our answer to that question," he continued. HC3 brings together the concepts of server, storage and virtualization into something that analysts call hyper-convergence—three or more HC3 nodes join together to form a single pool of resources onto which IT executives deploy all of their organizations’ applications. Analysts have confirmed that it takes one-tenth the time to set up, deploy and manage HC3 as opposed to traditional infrastructure, and it costs one-fifth of what that traditional infrastructure costs, Ready explained.

ViewSonic

ViewSonic has a new line of thin- and zero-client devices that enable businesses to easily transition from the PC computing era to the cloud, which it is showcasing at MES East, according to Colleen Browne, ViewSonic's director of channel and enterprise sales for North America. The new Linux-based SC-T35 and Windows-based SC-T45 thin-clients and the SC-Z55 zero-clients are great options for midmarket organizations. "We are also showcasing our award-winning, all-in-one Android smart display, which is perfect for home, business, retail and hospitality," she said. And, the question now becomes which device will serve that purpose. "We understand the demand of connecting a wider variety of devices and the strain this puts on understaffed IT resources," Browne said.

Websense

Websense is featuring its leading Triton v7.7 security solution, which includes 10 new inbound and outbound defenses for unmatched security, performance and availability, according to Chris Essex, senior director of sales at Websense. It also is featuring the results of a new third-party security effectiveness test. Websense Triton is a unified console with architecture that supports web, email and mobile security and data loss prevention (DLP) products that can be purchased together or individually. "We are focusing on the midmarket, and MES East is an excellent opportunity to discuss security strategy at a high level with target prospects and customers," said Essex.

VMware

VMware is highlighting a number of different offerings at MES East 2013. The first is vSphere with Operations Management, which combines its vSphere virtualization platform with vCenter Operations Management Suite. The second is its vCloud Suite offering, which is for customers interested in building in-house cloud infrastructure. The third is vSphere Data Protection Advanced, which is an integrated, scalable, virtualization-aware backup and recovery solution for vSphere. Lastly, it will be sharing its hybrid cloud plans that give midmarket customers options to seamlessly leverage a mix of resources from their own IT infrastructure and resources from public-cloud infrastructure, giving them a lot of flexibility as they grow. "We're making it easier for midmarket organizations to manage, deliver, secure and control desktops and data," said Brandon Sweeney, vice president of midmarket and small-business customer segment at VMware.

Xerox

At MES East 2013, Xerox is urging midmarket CIOs to focus on the most important parts of their businesses by removing distractions, freeing up time, money and resources and simplifying their work, according to Annalisa I. Mena, vice president of field and sales operations at Xerox. "Our newest technology platform called Xerox ConnectKey sets the foundation to achieve that, and we combine it with outstanding partner support to manage a print environment," said Mena. "From past MES events, we've found a very high degree of interest from midmarket CIOs who are looking for ways to be more productive and efficient without adding cost or resources. We welcome the opportunity to continue making those personal connections with the attendees at MES East 2013," she continued.