Certeon Virtualization Journal

Certeon, the industry’s first and only vendor to offer a virtualized appliance for application acceleration, today announced that SHIFT Communications, an award-winning independent PR agency in North America, has selected Certeon’s aCelera virtual appliance to dramatically improve remote file accessibility for its employees in Boston and San Francisco. Certeon’s aCelera delivers application acceleration by deploying software inside a virtual infrastructure—an ideal solution for SHIFT as it looked to optimize remote access performance over the wide area network (WAN).

With offices located on both U.S. coasts, SHIFT needed to decrease the time it took to access files using the CIFS protocol between its employees in Boston, MA and San Francisco, CA. In addition, SHIFT required a solution capable of improving the performance of its terminal services and boosting the response times of the Company intranet running on Microsoft SharePoint. Certeon’s deep knowledge of the application semantics behind SharePoint, coupled with the ease of deployment of its aCelera virtual appliance software, provided the breadth of capabilities needed to meet SHIFT’s challenges.

After deploying aCelera, SHIFT quickly saw application access and file download times decrease by up to 95 percent. Because the aCelera software is virtualized and capable of being managed from a central management system, SHIFT was able to deploy aCelera remotely from its Boston data center. With aCelera, SHIFT was able to not only decrease remote download times of Microsoft SharePoint files, but also win back those users who were in danger of abandoning the Company intranet.

aCelera addressed SHIFT’s needs to scale its distributed infrastructure and meet the remote access performance requirements of its growing remote workforce. With aCelera, SHIFT will be able to improve worker productivity and realize a tangible ROI from its virtualization investment.

“As a growing organization, SHIFT required a solution which would integrate easily with our existing infrastructure environment and provide the scalability to meet our future needs,” said Ed Weiler, a principal at SHIFT Communications. “Because we are not tied to a hardware appliance, Certeon will be able to scale with us as our business grows. Certeon’s easy-to-deploy software was accompanied by unrivaled technical support. Certeon’s broader functionality combined with its ability to generate reduced TCO provided the optimum solution for us when compared to the competition. We would not hesitate to recommend Certeon to any organization looking to improve efficiency at remote offices.”

aCelera Virtual Appliance software is the perfect union of virtualization and application acceleration technology and provides businesses with the combination of performance, scalability, flexibility, and easy management. Since Certeon provides acceleration as a virtual appliance enterprises can realize the reduced TCO available from virtualization. aCelera is hypervisor-agnostic and supports high performance remote application access in mixed Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX and ESXi environments. In addition, aCelera can be centrally managed and controlled through its compatibility with Microsoft System Center and VMware VirtualCenter management systems—enabling IT managers to allocate and manage application performance resources from a single location.

“At Certeon, we have an acute understanding of the impact that application response time has on user adoption and overall productivity,” said Peter Dougherty, president and CEO, Certeon. “aCelera provides distributed enterprises such as SHIFT immediate performance gains when remotely accessing mission-critical applications, and enables them to realize the full cost savings and flexibility from their virtualization and application acceleration investment.”

About SHIFT Communications

SHIFT Communications is an award-winning, privately-held national PR agency representing some of the best-known high-tech and consumer technology brands, including Akamai, Novell, Quantum, RealNetworks and Novartis. SHIFT pioneered the world's first Social Media News Release and Social Media Newsroom, changing PR forever. SHIFT Communications' 100+ employees are located in the Boston and San Francisco. For more information on SHIFT’s high-tech public relations and consumer public relations services, visit www.shiftcomm.com.

About Certeon

Certeon’s aCelera Virtual Appliance software is the industry’s first and only virtual appliance to deliver acceleration, virtualization and manageability when remotely accessing applications throughout a distributed enterprise. aCelera Virtual Appliances reduce application response time over the WAN by more than 95% without proprietary hardware appliances. aCelera is optimized for mission critical applications such as: enterprise content management, Web-based collaboration, and wide area file services. aCelera is flexible and easy to deploy delivering faster, more scalable applications, and enabling greater user productivity. Founded in 2003, Certeon is a private company, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.certeon.com or call 781-425-5200.

@2008 Certeon Inc. Certeon is a registered trademark and aCelera is a trademark of Certeon Inc.

All other company names and/or product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.