Both Barrels Communications Ltd

Reevoo’s ratings and reviews solution to build community and improve trust

JustShops, a collection of speciality e-commerce pet stores, is to add social commerce to all of its online stores with Reevoo. Social commerce will build greater trust, improve on-site conversion and make its sites more interactive and engaging.

JustShops provide pet owners with handpicked products, ranging from dog beds to rabbit hutches and chicken coops to parrot cages. Robbie Reddy, manager of E-commerce at Forward Internet Group Ltd – parent company of JustShops – said: “Social commerce is about building trust, raising brand awareness and adding value for our consumers. We want to encourage our customers to interact with us and with each other so that users can enjoy a more social, community experience on our sites. Word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer advice and recommendations are incredibly important to consumers, especially when they’re buying something online; we think it’s vital to bring this interactive quality to our sites so that users can get reassurance from other pet owners.

“Going forward, we will also be able to ask customers for their feedback on our sites and service; this information will help us to improve our sites and to provide our customers with the things they really want. We see this as the start of something really good for both our sites and our customers,” he added.

JustShops will measure the success of its social commerce solution by tracking review response rates, monitoring feedback on its products and services and, ultimately, by measuring the uplift in conversion rates that comes from providing impartial reviews to customers.

JustShops will be deploying the Reevoo Mark service across all of its product categories, to help customers make the right purchase decision. The Reevoo Mark service uses proactive harvesting to solicit reviews from verified product purchasers only, collecting and aggregating them, and then displaying reviews and Reevoo scores for all products directly on the product page.

One of the ways in which JustShops customers will be able to interact with each other is via the Reevoo Ask An Owner service, which transforms customer reviews from a broadcast medium to a conversation. Ask an Owner enables would-be purchasers to ask questions of already verified purchasers of that product, and to get a speedy response. Currently 55% of all Ask An Owner questions are answered within 24 hours, and response times can be as little as 12 minutes from question to answer.

Recent research by Reevoo shows that consumers are now more strongly influenced by consumer reviews (92%) than by friends’ or family recommendations (87%). Richard Anson, CEO and co-founder of Reevoo, said: “Everything to do with reviews and recommendations online is built on trust and it is at the heart of everything we do. Our research shows that people now trust Reevoo reviews more than word of mouth recommendations from families and friends; people have learned to trust the wisdom of crowds.

“And the size of the crowd can grow very quickly: as we sign additional retailers in any given market sector, we gather more and more product-review content which is then aggregated and syndicated on the sites of all relevant partners,” he added.

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Notes to editors
1. Reevoo recently published an eBook entitled ‘The Six Essentials of Social Commerce’, analysing common mistakes and how to avoid them. Reevoo’s eBook can be downloaded from www.reevoo.com/b2b/social-commerce.

2. Research figures quoted refer to a survey conducted by Reevoo in January 2011 among a sample of 736 Reevoo Plus users.

About JustShops
JustShops (http://www.justshops.com) is a collection of highly specialised online shops currently working within the pet vertical sector, designed to let consumers find and buy niche products quickly and easily online. JustShops currently comprises: JustCages.co.uk, JustDogKennels.co.uk, JustDogBeds.Org, UKParrotCages.co.uk, JustHamsters.co.uk, JustDogCages.co.uk, JustGuineaPigHutches.co.uk, JustVivariums.co.uk, JustChickenCoops.co.uk, JustRabbitHutches.co.uk and JustRabbitCages.co.uk.

JustShops is owned by Forward Internet Group Limited (http://www.forward.co.uk), a privately funded collection of internet-based businesses focused on consumer engagement and innovation.

About Reevoo
Reevoo (http://www.reevoo.com) aims to give the shopper everything they need to decide what to buy, in an impartial and straightforward environment. Reevoo reviews are independent, impartial and from genuine customers. Reevoo currently delivers over 70 million reviews a month for over 8m unique users. It is Europe’s leading social commerce aggregator working with top retailers and brands (see http://www.reevoo.com/b2b/ or visit our Social Commerce Blog), including TescoDirect, Dixons, Currys, Jessops, Orange, T-mobile, Sony, Kodak, Hotpoint, Sharp and Toshiba.

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced that The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea has completed an important upgrade to its storage management infrastructure with FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS).

The upgrade to FalconStor NSS is significant because it enables the Borough to leverage its existing storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager in its VMware environment in order to provide automated disaster recovery. FalconStor NSS serves as the gateway for storage virtualization and replication, utilizing the Borough´s storage arrays and provisioning them as virtual disks to the VMware environment, enabling VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager in their multivendor SAN infrastructure.

“Upgrading to FalconStor NSS means we have gained the functionality of VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager, which we really needed,” said Barry Goodall, IT manager for The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. “But we’re still entirely vendor neutral when it comes to choosing replacement storage arrays, some of which are entering their end-of-life phase now. This puts us in a stronger negotiating position with respect to the hardware vendors, saving taxpayers’ money without compromising the quality of our IT and storage infrastructure.”

“The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is realizing the promise of server and storage virtualization through their use of FalconStor NSS with VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager,” said Thomas Barrett, vice president for Northern European Sales & Operations for FalconStor. “They are now reaping the benefits, maximizing their system and data availability and improving their physical resource utilization.”

Other benefits of upgrading to FalconStor NSS includes access to advanced features, such as thin provisioning, and performance-enhancing benefits, such as true active-active failover for high data availability, leading to improved storage performance.

The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea first deployed FalconStor software solutions in 2005 and has remained a customer continuously since then. More than 20 terabytes of data are now under the management of its FalconStor NSS system. The solution manages both SAN and NAS, and replicates data between the Council’s primary and DR data centres.

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School determined not to learn lessons the hard way

FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), the provider of TOTALLY Open™ network storage software solutions, today announced the deployment of the FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP) solution at Bradford Grammar School, a private school in England, to provide Disaster Recovery (DR) functionality for the school’s extensive IT infrastructure.

“Information technology is pervasive throughout the school – it’s used to teach virtually every subject and its use increases continuously. Students also submit crucial coursework electronically, and we must treat it as irreplaceable,” said Simon Marriott, IT Manager at the Bradford Grammar School. “In such circumstances, a school’s IT infrastructure is not a luxury, but is as mission-critical as it might be in a commercial environment. That makes the decision to deploy enterprise-grade data protection the only sensible course of action, and FalconStor delivers the reliability we need at an affordable price.”

The school uses three key options available in the FalconStor CDP. These options comprise FalconStor Continuous Data Replication (CDR); application-aware Snapshot Agents; and the FalconStor TimeMark® option:

• CDR ensures that a remote disk is an exact copy of an identified disk and is kept continually updated with data changes. In the event of a primary disk failure at the school, the remote copy can be accessed to maintain data integrity.
• Snapshot Agents ensure active data stores are protected. Complete data and transactional integrity is attained through a robust and automated process that safely and reliably takes snapshots of the data stores for point-in-time copy purposes, third-party backup applications, and disaster recovery planning. This means that the data store copy can be brought online without going through any lengthy data store rebuild process to roll-back partial transactions, thus saving many hours of valuable and expensive time in the event of a disaster.
• The TimeMark option provides the school’s IT manager with the ability to instantly recover a single file or an entire volume back to a known good point in time. It creates periodic, scheduled or on-demand point-in-time delta snapshot copies of data volumes. These delta snapshots contain only data changes and therefore do not take up a significant amount of disk storage space. Up to 256 delta snapshots can be maintained per volume.

These options complement the existing data backup-to-tape processes: a full daily backup of 4.5TB of data on DotHill and IBM SAN storage subsystems.

FalconStor’s partner in the deployment was ANS Group, a technology infrastructure specialist in the provisioning of hardware, software and 24/7 managed services to enterprises. Scott Fletcher, chairman of ANS Group, said: “It’s impossible to overestimate how important IT infrastructure is in education nowadays. The ability to protect data is clearly essential because IT is used to such an extent in the teaching and administration of schools and because student coursework, which directly contributes to their academic qualifications, is all securely stored by the school.”

One of Europe’s largest accounting firms, Mazars, has deployed FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS), powered by FalconStor IPStor® software, to strengthen its storage capacity.

Delivered in conjunction with FalconStor partner Intercept IT, the FalconStor Network Storage Server provides cutting edge disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities, while retaining Mazars’ existing storage infrastructure, maximising the return on its existing storage investment.

Mazars’ requirements for its new storage solution included deployment of storage to VMware as well as new applications such as improved stability of the storage; replacement of the existing disaster recovery (DR) plan; provision of business continuity (BC) in the event of disk failure; simplification of storage management; and reuse of existing storage infrastructure.

Intercept IT and FalconStor met these requirements by assisting Mazars with the selection of the relevant optional services available as part of the FalconStor NSS solution:

• Snapshot Director for VMware ensures the transactional consistency of VMware applications
• Synchronous Mirroring option protects the RAID subsystem, ensuring storage stability
• Replication option provides DR capabilities
• TimeMark® option delivers Business Continuity by creating scheduled or on-demand point-in-time snapshots
• Storage Service Enabler option enables seamless migration of data to the newly configured storage system
• Application-aware Snapshot Agents ensure the transactional consistency for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL servers

A total of 4TB of storage serving 20 HP servers is now managed and protected by the FalconStor NSS solution – a volume reported as doubling annually. A virtual and service-enabled fibre channel SAN spans multiple sites, replacing direct-attached storage (DAS). Two NSS servers in an active/active configuration replicate to a single, remote, disaster recovery NSS server. DotHill SANet II and Xyratex storage subsystems provide the storage capacity.

Jayson Dudley, service delivery manager at Mazars, said, “We wanted to lay down solid foundations for our growing data protection and storage management needs. The FalconStor NSS solution delivered all the functionality we required, managed by a single console. We’ve also been quite proactive in deploying VMware, but a virtual platform, like a physical one, needs protection. FalconStor Snapshot Director for VMware VI3 is a cost-effective, easily-deployable way to ensure complete application data integrity for our Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server virtual machines running on VMware ESX with the FalconStor NSS.”

Steve Whitfield, sales manager at Intercept IT, said: “Tackling so many issues in a single deployment could have been expensive as well as complicated. But FalconStor not only made it straightforward to implement, its lack of vendor lock-in also enabled us to re-use the customer’s existing hardware, which reduced the overall project expenditure for the customer.”

Thomas Barrett, Northern Region Director, FalconStor, said, ”This project demonstrates that companies do not need to shy away from simultaneously tackling all the issues in their storage infrastructure. The nature of the FalconStor NSS optional services means that there is little additional headache involved in addressing everything at once.”

About Mazars
Mazars is an integrated, independent and international firm, specialising in audit, accounting, tax and advisory services. Based on its European heart and its international dimension, Mazars has built a unique integrated partnership and can rely on the skills of 8,000 professionals to fully operate in 42 countries around the world.

About Intercept IT
Intercept IT is one of the UK’s leading Solution Providers, whose consultants are acknowledged as experts in their fields by many leading vendors, such as Microsoft, HP, Citrix, VMware and Softricity. The business is focused on enabling organisations to harness the power of centralisation and virtualisation technologies, in order to reduce IT management time and cost, whilst providing an enhanced user experience. By empowering a workforce with location and device independent access to the information and services they require, businesses are able to make faster, smarter decisions, leading to increased productivity and measurable operational benefits. Centralisation, virtualisation and optimisation are the three core pillars around which the business is built.