Cross Atlantic Capital Partners Invests in Rootstock Software

RADNOR, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cross Atlantic Capital Partners today announced its investment in Rootstock Software®, the market-leading Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of manufacturing enterprise software, serving discrete manufacturers in the mid-market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “Led by Founder and CEO Pat Garrehy, we were drawn to Rootstock because of the strength of the management team, who have demonstrated deep expertise and prowess within the manufacturing software systems industry” Rootstock Software was launched in 2008 in response to the growing need for a SaaS solution for mid-market manufacturers to cut costs, improve processes, and increase revenue for its users. Rootstock, in conjunction with its partners, delivers these critical manufacturing capabilities to an underserved market with minimal IT infrastructure investment. “Led by Founder and CEO Pat Garrehy, we were drawn to Rootstock because of the strength of the management team, who have demonstrated deep expertise and prowess within the manufacturing software systems industry,” said Don Caldwell, Founder and CEO of Cross Atlantic. “We believe the combination of Rootstock's management team, proprietary SaaS infrastructure and their business partnerships gives them a tremendous advantage over the competition. We are very excited about this investment,” he added. About Rootstock Software Rootstock Software® was launched in 2008 in response to the growing need for a SaaS solution for mid-market manufacturers to cut costs, improve processes, and drive revenues. Rootstock partners with industry leaders to deliver these critical manufacturing capabilities to the underserved mid-market with minimal IT infrastructure investment. For more information about Rootstock, please visitwww.rootstocksoftware.com. About Cross Atlantic Capital Partners Based in Radnor, Pa., Cross Atlantic Capital Partners ("XACP") is one of the leading venture capital firms based in the mid-Atlantic region, with over $500 million under management. XACP invests primarily in early- to mid-stage technology companies in the United States. Leveraging its deep, multi-disciplined network of global contacts, and the operational experience of its investment team, the firm actively assists its entrepreneurs and portfolio companies. The XACP portfolio currently includes a diverse array of companies focusing on Enterprise Software, SaaS, IT Services, Telecommunications, Financial Services, and other innovative technologies. http://www.xacp.com/

NZ Scientists Study Smarter Software Development

Victoria scientists are combining their expertise with collaborators at universities around New Zealand to come up with faster, more flexible and more affordable ways of developing software.

The four-year project is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and has input from a range of industry partners.

James Noble, a professor of Computer Science at Victoria, says the traditional process for developing software dates back to the 1960s and has its roots in computerisation for the space race and weapons development.

“It was driven by cost overruns in the United States Defence Department. They couldn’t buy the software they wanted so decided to develop their own, but the process they put in place was quite bureaucratic,” says Professor Noble.

He says with traditional approaches, as much as half the effort can go into planning, detailed documentation and formal sign off by the parties involved before development work begins.

The Agile approach was created to address some of those issues and is rapidly being adopted by many of the world’s software giants. Agile methods involve self-organising teams that develop software through iterative and incremental work cycles in close collaboration with their customers. Changes can be made at any stage and the product is tested along the way to ensure early detection of problems.

“Anecdotal evidence shows it speeds up software development and can show more quickly where problems lie or whether the project is doomed,” says Professor Noble.

But, despite its burgeoning popularity, many aspects of the Agile process have not been researched until now.

Victoria postdoctoral researcher Dr Rashina Hoda is investigating how teams should self-organise. She has studied 58 Agile practitioners from 23 software organisations in New Zealand, India and North America over the past four years to understand how they go about self-organising. She has used the information to develop a process others can follow.

“There has been a real lack of research on the subject and practitioners are left wondering how to go about self-organising. There’s no boss telling you the process to follow—instead the team has to take ownership.

“It’s also a high pressure environment—things are constantly changing and there are deadlines to meet.”

Dr Hoda has identified the critical roles in a team, which she has named Mentor, Co-ordinator, Champion, Promoter and Terminator, and a set of practices. Her research has also shown that support from senior management within the organisation is vital and that projects go more smoothly when customers play an active role. 

NYSE announces financial services cloud

Computerworld - The New York Stock Exchange Euronext's technology division today announced a cloud services offering for the capital markets community, a product it described as the financial services industry's first cloud platform.

NYSE Technologies said its Capital Markets Community Platform was designed to "increase business agility, simplify market access and reduce trading friction by using rapid on-demand computing resources."

The platform will offer a range of cloud-based services that will allow NYSE Euronext's 1,200 broker-dealer clients to purchase the computing power required at a given time so they can focus on their core business strategy rather than complex IT infrastructure design and maintenance.

The Community Platform is in beta testing and is expected to go live July 1. It will offer access to a full range of financial service applications as well as managed services.

NYSE Technologies' CEO Stanley Young said the service already has several customers, including Millennium Management, Pico Quantitative Trading, and others he could not make public.

"We are very excited to integrate it into our infrastructure and begin utilizing the efficiencies of cloud computing across our operations," Jarrod Yuster, CEO of Pico Quantitative Trading, said in a statement. "This fully managed platform can efficiently meet the diverse trading needs of customers of all kinds, from broker-dealers and institutional investors to latency-sensitive trading firms anywhere in the world."

The service will be priced on a standard per-CPU model.

The platform, which resides in a new 100,000-square-foot data center, was built using VMware's vSphere cloud infrastructure management software, vCloud Director and VMware vShield security application as well as EMC's VNX unified storage arrays, which provide both file and block-level data through a single interface.

"This platform provides a seamless migration route for them to move their existing applications onto it, " Young said. He spoke during a press and analyst conference today with executives from EMC and its VMware subsidiary.

Traditionally, Fortune 1000 companies and in particular financial services companies, have shunned the public cloud, fearing that any data in the cloud could not be secured.

When asked to compare NYSE's cloud offering to that of Google's or Amazon's, Young said it should not be considered a public cloud.

"This is about building a community around services that are highly available, highly robust, in an infrastructure that has already been plugged into the global capital market," he said. "We're catering to a different need. There will always be a need for ... public clouds, private clouds and community clouds. We're one facet of that."

He added, "I could envision a day when we'd plug this into public clouds to consume their services, but we'd provide an aggregation layer on behalf of our community members to get them into other cloud service providers."

Emirates Women Award winners

DUBAI — The 11th edition of the Airport Show, organised by Reed Exhibitions Middle East, continued to generate interest amongst experts and stakeholders from the aviation industry for the second consecutive day.

The trade event, which concludes today, saw members from specialised sectors of aviation such as air transport, airports, security and technology sectors as well as representatives from key regional airports in attendance.

Participants include 160 confirmed exhibitors as well as 63 members of the Hosted Buyers Programme, reinforcing the significance of the importance of the exhibition as a global platform which engages senior experts and specialists in the relevant sectors to exchange views and ideas, and to highlight the opportunities available.

“The Airport Show is an excellent networking platform, especially to showcase the achievements of the local aviation industry. We are proud to showcase the Fujairah International airport at this platform. The Arab states today lead the development opportunities within this sector at a global level and we see the region’s airports amongst the leading consumers to adopt and embrace state-of-the-art equipment and sophisticated technology being developed for the aviation industry,” Dr Khalid Al Mazroui, Director-General of Fujairah International Airport, said.

The exhibition provides a great opportunity for professionals from the airport industry and brings together a large number of companies specialising in aviation, technology, security and airport equipment and devices under one roof.  Airport Show 2011 focuses on the huge investments involved in the building of new airports and the expansion of existing airports in the region, which is expected to be worth $90 billion (Dh331 billion) in the next few years. The exhibition has succeeded in attracting projects which are still in the process of study and research worth $29.16 billion (Dh106 billion).

“A large number of exhibitors at the Airport Show 2011 launched new and innovative technological solutions at par with the developments in the global aviation sector, thus contributing to the region’s industry, which has maintained a consistent rate of growth in spite of the challenges surrounding economic sectors in different regions of the world,” Mohamad Bader-Eddin, Show Director, Reed Exhibitions-Middle East, said.

“In addition to that, several exhibitors have inked deals worth millions of dirhams, at the exhibition, in areas related to technology for aviation, security services and control of airport operations and passenger traffic, as well as technology for handling and shipping, or other areas relating to airports. This only reinforces our conviction about the event providing a genuine platform for the industry, and justifies the effort spent on organising this exhibition,” added Bader-Eddin.

Fujairah International Airport announced the selection of ALES for the supply of Air Traffic Control System and ERA for the Wide Area Multilateration radar. The Dh10 million deal will include a full automation of the Air Control Center and an advanced surveillance solution based on the proven Multilateration and ADS-B technology.

On its second day, the ‘Airport Leaders Summit’ highlighted several topics including ‘Non-Aeronautical Revenue Generation’, ‘Airport Sustainability and Environment’ and ‘Airport Infrastructure Development Initiatives’, which in general also focused on security, sustainable expansion and current economic concerns.Discussions also aimed to find long-term solutions to strategic issues the industry faces in the wake of the global economic uncertainty, rigid credit markets, high fuel prices and changing regulatory norms. 
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MapR Technologies, EMC Announce Software Licensing Agreement

MapR Technologies and EMC (News  - Alert), a provider of storage hardware solutions that promote data recovery and improve cloud computing, have entered into a technologysoftware licensing agreement in which MapR Technologies will be part of the recently announced EMC Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition, a 100 percent interface-compatible implementation of the Apache Hadoop software stack.

As part of software licensing agreement MapR Technologieswill be part of the recently announced EMC Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition, a 100 percent interface-compatible implementation of the Apache Hadoop software stack.

The new EMC system will incorporate MapR Technologies’ pre-integrated, tested and hardened distribution for Apache Hadoop.

“EMC is focused on delivering the best-in-class solutions for Big Data. We evaluated the various Hadoop software offerings and believe that MapR is the clear enterprise- class innovation leader. With MapR, we are able to provide an unmatched solution for high availability, fault tolerance, and enterprise-class support and service,” said Scott Yara, co-founder of Greenplum and Vice president of products, data computing division of EMC, in a statement.

“Combined with the EMC Greenplum Database we will enable the co-processing of both structured and unstructured data within a single, seamless solution,” said Yara.

Although a number of Hadoop distributions are available, they fail to address underlying customer concerns such as single points of failure, lack of snapshots and mirroring, and poor performance, according to company offiicals.

“This is a major advancement for Hadoop users everywhere. MapR’s innovations coupled with EMC’s big data analytics capabilities and service will allow more people to use the power of big data analytics and enable substantial market growth,” said John Webster, senior analyst, at Evaluator Group.

Webster said that MapR has managed to innovate on performance, cost reduction, dependability and ease-of-use all at once. This marks a major shift for the Hadoop market, he said.

Officials with MapR said that the company’s innovations transform Hadoop into a dependable compute platform while also increasing performance. Specific MapR advances make Hadoop, easy, dependable and fast.

“Today marks an exciting milestone as we announce our partnership with EMC and unveil the industry’s best distribution for Apache Hadoop that will advance and grow the entire market,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder, MapR Technologies.

“We listened to customers, partners and the community about where Hadoop needed major investment and addressed those areas by delivering breakthrough innovations,” said Schroeder.

Celerant Technology Hosts 2011 User Conference Highlighting Retail Software Functionality

Staten Island, NY (May 31, 2011) - Celerant Technology’s 2011 User Conference was held April 28-29 at the exquisite Millennium Broadway hotel in New York City. This year’s conference included interactive break-out sessions, training sessions, and workshops, all of which reviewed the new features and functionalities that are being made available to the Celerant client base.

“This year’s conference was again a great success” stated Ian Goldman, CEO/President of Celerant Technology. “Throughout the year, our development staff has engineered new technology for wireless device applications, advanced reporting features for Data Warehousing, and a redesigned POS screen, all of which were displayed and discussed during the conference. We strive to develop such creative and innovative improvements to promote customer satisfaction and enable the software to be more user-friendly and maintain a high level of technical advancement.”

The 2011 Celerant User Conference was an educational opportunity for clients to learn about the many enhancements being made to the Command Retail system, as well as an effective networking opportunity to interact and learn from other retailers. This year presented a restructured format providing clients with the option to attend an added session. Several additions were also made to the list of session choices for this year, including two interactive New Features Workshops, as well as new sessions on E-Commerce, Team Sports, and General Ledger.

“I found the Celerant User Conference to be an excellent learning environment to expand my abilities and knowledge of the software,” stated Dan Kastelman, CFO of Devi Kroell. “It's great to be able to share ideas with the Celerant staff and other Celerant clients. The sessions are extremely dedicated and informative, and highly relevant to the needs of my company. I look forward to next year's event and upcoming enhancements to the software."

“It’s great to see old Celerant friends and meet new ones face to face,” stated Charlie Rochman, Business Manager for Buffalo Exchange. “Our team picked up some great information that should help us in our operations.”

“As in years past, the 2011 Celerant User Conference once again proved to be extremely beneficial,” said C&W Shoes CFO, Will Brooks. “I am not only more informed of the uses of the software but I am also more resolved in knowing that we have aligned with the right company. Far from complacent, the software continues to be innovative and the passion of the Celerant team towards continued improvement is refreshing.”

Research has already begun to determine the location for next year’s User Conference and the Celerant clients will again vote on their city of choice. With the clients’ feedback from this year’s event, there will be many new concepts introduced to make next year’s event an even greater success.

About Celerant Technology
Celerant’s Command Retail is an advanced real-time retail management system, which manages all areas of retail including POS, Inventory Management, Warehouse, Distribution Center, Allocation, Multi-Channel/E-Commerce/Kiosk, Data Mining, and Back-office, in a single, integrated system. Our advantage is the flexibility of our Java platform, allowing Celerant professionals to conduct cost-effective analysis and adaptation based on the individual needs of each retailer. The result is a better system that meets the needs of retail businesses and gives them the tools to take Command of their success. For more information regarding Celerant Technology, go to www.celerant.com. For information on the Command Retail product, visit www.commandretail.com.

Start Using GlaceEMR v4.5 in 7 Days With the Glenwood EMR FastTrack Program

GlaceEMR v4.5 FastTrack program was developed for rapid deployment of a certified Complete EHR allowing physicians to start the Meaningful Use incentive program process quickly and easily.

Glenwood Systems LLC announced today that the company has developed a program to provide physicians GlaceEMR version 4.5, a 2011/2012 compliant Complete EHR ONC certified electronic health record system, in seven (7) business days. The GlaceEMR FastTrack program is a standardized GlaceEMR v4.5 designed for rapid deployment in the field providing physicians a fast and easy way to begin the Meaningful Use incentive process.

“Glenwood Systems recognized that physicians are moving quickly to capitalize on the 2011 Meaningful Use incentive of up to $18,000 but are slowed by extended implementation periods, said Ron Flormann CCO Glenwood Systems LLC, Our goal is to provide physicians with a certified EMR in as little as seven business days so that they can meet the 2011 requirement of 90 days continuous use.”

GlaceEMR, Version 4.5, by Glenwood Systems LLC’s certification number is CC-1112-347100-1. GlaceEMR version 4.5 CMS ID is 30000001SXNPEAS. ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification conferred by CCHIT does not represent an endorsement of the certified EHR technology by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nor does it guarantee the receipt of incentive payments.

GlaceEMR, Version 4.5, meets the Complete EHR certification criteria as an integrated bundle of EHR modular products. The products which make up the Complete EHR include: NQF 0421, NQF 0013, NQF 0028, NQF 0041, NQF 0024, NQF 0038, NQF 0059, NQF 0064, and NQF 0061.
The additional software GlaceEMR, Version 4.5 relied upon to demonstrate compliance includes:
SureScripts, Multum Lexi-Data, Java SE 6.0 Security-SHA-512, Java SE 6.0 Security – AES and Adobe SVG Viewer OR Compatible SVG Viewer Browser Plug-In.

GlaceEMR v4.5 is also certified in CCHIT’s separate and independently developed certification program. GlaceEMR v4.5 is a CCHIT Certified® 2011 Ambulatory EHR. Glenwood Systems LLC has certified its EHR technology in both programs to provide greater assurance to its customers.

About Glenwood Systems LLC
Glenwood Systems LLC is a privately held Waterbury, CT company that develops software to help healthcare businesses manage patient information and finances.

Glenwood Systems LLC emphasizes product excellence, a high level of customer service and exceptional stakeholder value. Founded in 1998 and enjoying strong growth in its history, Glenwood Systems is quickly becoming a leader in EMR, practice management and physician practice billing services. More information about Glenwood and the Glace family of products can be found at http://www.glenwoodsystems.com or contact Ron Flormann.

About CCHIT
The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) is an independent, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with the public mission of accelerating the adoption of robust, interoperable health information technology. The Commission has been certifying electronic health record technology since 2006 and is approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as an Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB). More information on CCHIT, CCHIT Certified® products and ONC-ATCB certified electronic health record technology is available athttp://cchit.org.

About ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification
The ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification program tests and certifies that EHR technology is capable of meeting the 2011/2012 criteria approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). The certifications include Complete EHRs, which meet all of the 2011/2012 criteria for either eligible provider or hospital technology and EHR Modules, which meet one or more – but not all – of the criteria. ONC-ATCB certification aligns with Health Information Technology: Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications, and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Record Technology published in the Federal Register in July 2010 and strictly adheres to the test procedures published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the time of testing. ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification conferred by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) does not represent an endorsement of the certified EHR technology by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nor does it guarantee the receipt of incentive payments.

“CCHIT®” and “CCHIT Certified®” are registered trademarks of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology.