Both Barrels Communications Ltd

Responds to growing demand from European brands and retailers for proven social commerce solutions

In response to rapidly growing demand from retailers and brands for proven social commerce solutions, Reevoo is to accelerate its expansion across Europe. Already Europe’s largest provider of such social commerce solutions and with partners in 14 countries, Reevoo’s social commerce solutions have been shown to boost ecommerce conversion rates for retailers by up to 18%. 64% of companies plan to increase their budgets for on-site social media ratings during 2011*.

Recent research by Reevoo in the UK showed that social commerce content – such as consumer reviews, Facebook, and recommendations from friends and family – is having a huge impact on the consumer purchase journey. For major items, consumers spend an average of just six minutes on a retailer website after researching for at least 24 hours.

Consumers’ faith in social sources of information is now higher than in any alternative: 70% said that recommendations from friends are important, and 62% of people rated consumer reviews as important. This is substantially more than those who rated as important recommendations from the media or shop staff – 35% and 28% respectively.

The proportion of people using their smartphone to research and solicit information is now 38%. 39% of people turn to their social network on Facebook to research and make purchase decisions.

Richard Anson, founder and CEO at Reevoo, said: “The unstoppable rise of social media is fuelling dramatic growth in social commerce and is having a profound influence on the way people do their shopping. Social media affects everything about the way consumers make their purchase: from what to buy, to where to buy it.”

To meet the challenges identified by the research, Reevoo recently launched an extensive new portfolio of social commerce products. The new solutions have been designed to help retailers and brands move beyond product reviews and ratings to address issues of brand, service, engagement, real-time response and post-sales support – in effect, to establish presence and trust across all consumer-brand touchpoints.

Reevoo’s approach to bringing its portfolio of social commerce solutions to marketers across Europe is multi-tracked. The company expects to accelerate its growth by directly signing a broad spectrum of retailers, manufacturers and other brands through proactive marketing of its solutions to a range of vertical market sectors, and by signing agreements with distribution partners that have pan-European reach.

Reevoo’s Richard Anson said: “Marketers are well aware that change is coming, but our research shows clearly just how dramatic that change is. There are grave threats for retailers who fail to respond, but there are also potentially enormous benefits for those who embrace social commerce. The time is therefore right for Reevoo to accelerate its expansion into Europe to help marketers embrace social commerce using Reevoo solutions, and one aspect of our strategy is to give them more than one option in respect of how they do that.”

*Source: Econsultancy, ‘Marketing Budgets 2011’ report, February 2011

Notes to editors

1. For information on why Reevoo is Europe’s leading social commerce company, visit http://b2b.reevoo.com/why-reevoo

2. For sales enquiries, email: sales@reevoo.com or call +44 20 7654 0331.

FalconStor today announced that Diamond Point International (DPI) has joined its UK reseller channel. DPI is the European distributor of Violin Memory, with which FalconStor announced the FalconStor® NSS SAN Accelerator flash memory-based storage system in March 2010. DPI will resell this solution as well as other solutions from FalconStor’s data protection portfolio.

“Diamond Point is very excited to become a FalconStor partner” said John Vaines, managing director at DPI. “As the main distributor for Violin Memory in Europe, I can see great advantages marrying the two technologies together. The FalconStor NSS gateway gives us a certified connection to a virtualised environment and a level of sophistication that power users of Violin high-performance solid state storage arrays have come to expect.”

Thomas Barrett, regional director for northern Europe, FalconStor, said: “Using FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator, a solid-state layer of 1 percent of a SAN´s total storage capacity will increase overall SAN performance by more than 100 percent. With solid state disk prices falling, we think this is a solution that more and more customers will look at in order to squeeze more value and performance, cost-effectively, from their SANs. Working with DPI is an entirely logical step for both parties, and we look forward to a productive relationship.”

Diamond Point International is a distributor and manufacturer of computer equipment and GPS devices, headquartered in Rochester, Kent, UK, and servicing a mix of OEMs and system integrators.

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Notes to editors
In March 2010, FalconStor and Violin announced FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator, the first flash-memory-based storage system that simultaneously accelerates reads and writes for mission-critical applications as well as general SAN performance.

FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator leverages solid-state storage as an on-demand dynamic storage tier to accelerate both writes and reads with two key features: FalconStor’s SafeCache™ and HotZone® technology respectively. Either solid-state disks or solid-state memory resources can be dedicated to specific workloads or can be global to the whole storage environment, allowing efficient allocation of the solid-state storage cache. The intelligent algorithms of SafeCache and HotZone features accelerate and protect applications where performance enhancements are needed the most.

FalconStor’s PartnerChoice program and PartnerPlace portal tailor sales tools and support to channel partners’ needs

FalconStor today launched PartnerChoice, a three-tiered channel partner program designed to provide optimal channel marketing and sales support based on a partner’s business model, level of engagement and commitment. As an integral part of its new partner program, FalconStor has launched the PartnerPlace Web portal, which allows partners to track opportunities, manage account information and access an extensive knowledgebase of resources.

“The PartnerChoice program is built on three key principles: invest resources to build long-term relationships, increase partner profitability and maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction,” said Brendan Kinkade, vice president of channel management and global alliances for FalconStor Software. “FalconStor has made a firm commitment to nurturing partnerships that will create greater opportunity, synergy and collective strength – and to continue to improve the quality of our processes and products that are the basis of these partnerships. The proof of this commitment is in the launch of PartnerChoice, a profit-rich program created exclusively to help channel partners grow their data protection business with FalconStor.”

With three distinct tiers of engagement, FalconStor’s PartnerChoice program is designed to drive revenue and growth objectives for channel partners through financial incentives, sales and marketing tools, and training and support. All partners can participate in margin building, deal registration and financial incentives with no minimum requirements. FalconStor helps partners earn greater rewards according to their commitment and business goals through market development funds and revenue goal rebates.

Visit FalconStor’s website for more information about the PartnerChoice program.

FalconStor Software, Inc. has entered into a managed services and reseller agreement with HP Enterprise Services.

Under the terms of the agreement, effective October 1, 2010, FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) software will be used to create new disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity offerings for HP Business Continuity & Recovery Services (BCRS) customers. This agreement enables HP Enterprise Services to add new heterogeneous replication services to the comprehensive offerings of HP BCRS as well as the full data protection capabilities of the FalconStor NSS solution.

“The FalconStor NSS solution’s heterogeneous replication feature provides HP’s Business Continuity & Recovery Services a critical capability that allows HP to replicate between any brand of storage to and from the customer site and the BCRS recovery site,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor. “We look forward to working with HP and providing leading products in the growing market for cloud-based replication and DR solutions.”

- Hitachi Data Systems to deliver FalconStor’s VTL and deduplication solutions
- Integrated with Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family

FalconStor Software, Inc. today announced that FalconStor has entered into a limited procurement agreement with Hitachi Data Systems. Under the terms of the agreement, Hitachi Data Systems will resell FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication and FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS) integrated with the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family on a limited basis.

The arrangement between Hitachi Data Systems and FalconStor Software enables the combination of industry-leading high-performance storage arrays with the world’s number one VTL/deduplication system and the industry’s first LAN-based deduplication system with high availability.

“This new reseller agreement with Hitachi Data Systems brings to market powerful integrated solutions that combine best-of-breed storage and data management software,” said Bernie Wu, vice president of business development for FalconStor. “The Hitachi AMS 2000 family from HDS is ideal for FalconStor’s VTL and deduplication applications designed to bring greater efficiency to today’s data center.”

About the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family
The Adaptable Modular Storage 2000 family is a flexible storage platform designed to help organizations achieve key business benefits, such as meeting service level agreements (SLAs), attaining cost-effective performance and ensuring nondisruptive operations while realizing better administrative efficiencies and investment protection. There are three models in the family – the AMS 2100, AMS 2300 and AMS 2500. While these models differ in capacity, connectivity, performance and price points, each of these models has the same reliability and enterprise-level features.

About FalconStor Software
FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is the market leader in disk-based data protection. FalconStor delivers proven, comprehensive data protection solutions that facilitate the continuous availability of business-critical data with speed, integrity and simplicity. The Company’s TOTALLY Open™ technology solutions, built upon the award-winning IPStor® platform, include the industry leading Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication, Continuous Data Protector (CDP), File-interface Deduplication System (FDS), and Network Storage Server (NSS), each enabled with WAN-optimized replication for disaster recovery and remote office protection, and the HyperFS™ file system. FalconStor products are available as OEM or branded solutions from industry leaders, including Acer, Data Direct Networks, Dynamic Solutions International, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, Pillar Data Systems, SGI, SeaChange and Spectra Logic and are deployed by thousands of customers worldwide, from small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises.

FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, N.Y., with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. FalconStor is an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). For more information, visit www.falconstor.com.

Will deliver FalconStor® VTL and deduplication solutions in Nordics, Baltic States and The Netherlands

FalconStor Software, Inc. and Proact, a Swedish value-added IT storage systems integrator, have signed an agreement, effective immediately, for Proact to resell FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication in several European countries, including Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Baltic States and The Netherlands.

“Proact enjoys a strong reputation in the region for deploying high-quality storage solutions, making it a strong partner for us in this region,” said Thomas Barrett, vice president of northern European sales and operations for FalconStor. “Northern Europe is a growth market for FalconStor, and we believe that working with Proact is an important early step towards improving our reach throughout this region.”

“FalconStor VTL with deduplication is a complementary fit with our storage portfolio, improving the range of solutions we can offer our customers,” said Jakob Høholdt, vice president of corporate strategy and efficiency for Proact IT Group. “In particular, tape-free backup and data deduplication continue to be a hot topic for our customers, and FalconStor VTL with deduplication gives us a terrific solution to meet their current needs.”

Proact’s customer base consists of corporations and organisations with mission-critical information managed in complex data center environments within industries such as oil and energy, telecommunications, banking and finance, entertainment and media as well as within the public sector.

About Proact
Proact is a specialist in storage, archiving and securing large volumes of mission-critical information. As an independent integrator, Proact provides systems, support and consulting services within its focus area of data storage and archiving. The Proact Group has more than 300 employees and conducts business in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Proact was founded in 1994, and its parent company, Proact IT Group AB has been listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm since 1999 under the symbol PACT. Additional information about Proact is available at www.proact.eu.

FalconStor today introduced a low-priced virtualisation promotion in order to increase reseller margins on smaller virtualisation projects.

“Virtualisation starts to make sense as soon as a company reaches just three physical servers,” explains Philippe Bruiant, director of channel sales operations, FalconStor EMEA. “And, when you consider how common it is to have a file server, print server, email server, network server or a database server, that actually means a heck of a lot of businesses.”

“However, many of these businesses will not be interested in zero downtime, or fault tolerance, or disaster recovery. Consequently, projects for this sort of customer tend to be of low value, generating low margins for resellers – and this makes them unattractive projects. This highly competitive offer is for resellers that are willing to virtualise the servers and storage of customers with limited requirements and provides the resellers with ‘instant margin’,” Bruiant said.

Until June 15th, the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) Virtual Appliance with a one terabyte storage capacity license is priced at €800, a reduction of €400, on proof of purchase of a VMware vSphere™ 4 Essentials Bundle. VMware is currently offering its vSphere™ 4 Essentials Bundle at US$495 instead of US$995. Products are available from VMware- and FalconStor-accredited channel partners respectively. [See Notes to editors for more details.]

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About VMware vSphere™ Essentials
About VMware VSphere™ Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small businesses to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.

About FalconStor NSS
FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliance transforms internal disk storage of servers (DAS) into an iSCSI SAN. A cost-effective, highly available infrastructure for the small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote office/branch offices (ROBOs), it enables VMware‘s advanced features yet needs no additional storage network investment. All FalconStor solutions come in three deployment options: virtual appliance, storage appliance, or gateway appliance (connects to third-party storage devices).

Note to editors
Both products in the bundle are available from VMware- and FalconStor-accredited channel partners, respectively. Both products must be purchased within 10 working days of each other. Proof of VMware vSphere purchase will be asked by FalconStor. Offer price valid for orders received by June 15, 2010.

New FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator doubles overall SAN performance
at a fraction of the cost of conventional disk storage solutions

FalconStor Software and Violin Memory today announced the first flash-memory-based storage system that simultaneously accelerates reads and writes for mission-critical applications as well as general SAN performance. The FalconStor® NSS SAN Accelerator doubles SAN performance, delivering high-speed access to stored data with minimal latency, at a fraction of the cost of conventional solutions.

The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator combines the FalconStor® Network Storage Server (NSS) Gateway, a Violin 1010 Flash Memory Appliance and FalconStor’s storage management software to create a virtual SAN out of new or existing storage resources while introducing a solid state memory array as a caching platform for all application data requiring the fastest input/output (I/O). The integrated solution uses an economical amount of solid state storage as a caching platform. Lab tests of the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator conducted by FalconStor show that a solid-state layer of one percent of a SAN’s total storage capacity will increase overall SAN performance greater than 100 percent.

“Our evaluation of the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator proved that it can significantly enhance storage response time and underload scalability,” said George Crump, founder of Storage Switzerland. “The interesting capability of this system is that it can be deployed into an existing SAN and yield impressive improvements in performance and scalability at a reasonable cost.”

“There are no other solutions on the market today that can yield as much performance enhancement out of a modest investment in a solid state tier of a virtualized SAN,” said Fadi Albatal, vice president of marketing for FalconStor. “FalconStor’s innovative storage management software intelligently and predictably accelerates reads and writes to the SAN on a global basis and is not exclusive to an application or a specific storage segment.”

FalconStor’s SafeCache™ and HotZone® features for Write/Read Acceleration
FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator speeds up both writes and reads with two unique capabilities of Falconstor storage management software: SafeCache™ and HotZone® features. FalconStor’s SafeCache capability allows a segment of the solid state memory array to be devoted to application writes so that all disk writes can be received and acknowledged with low latency. The data is then written transparently to the destination storage volumes on the SAN.

FalconStor’s HotZone capability accelerates the read process of specific applications, including random-access databases, and general SAN I/O by monitoring disk access patterns and then intelligently copying the hot data to a HotZone cache on the solid state memory array for faster read access. When the data is no longer heavily used, the data is deleted from the cache and referenced back to its original location in the SAN to make room for other highly active datasets.

About the Violin 1010 Flash Memory Appliance
The Violin 1010 is a four-terabyte enterprise-class flash appliance that provides sustainable performance with sub-100uS deterministic latency and serviceability (including automatic active sparing and hot swap of flash modules). Based on patent-pending flash RAID algorithms, the Violin 1010 provides enterprise data centers with performance and reliability at a lower cost than any traditional performance storage systems with solid state disks (SSD). To achieve a 100 percent performance boost, it is more than three times less expensive to add a solid state memory cache with the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator than it is to upgrade a SAN with additional disk arrays.

“Violin Memory is dedicated to developing the fastest, most reliable and economical solid state memory solutions for the enterprise market,” said Matt Barletta, vice president of product marketing for Violin Memory. “Solid state as a consumer technology has been around for a while, but we are now showing the many ways that scalable solid state memory arrays can revolutionize traditional enterprise storage methods and business practices. Together with FalconStor, we are providing customers with application acceleration options and flexibility never before available.”

Pricing and availability
FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator will be available in Europe from May for a list price of $32,000, which includes one solid state memory array with 500 gigabytes of RAID-protected storage capacity. The solution will be available through FalconStor’s channel partners.

About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory, Inc. provides the world’s fastest and most scalable memory appliances that provide dramatic application acceleration for enterprise applications ranging from database, analytics, data warehousing, SAN acceleration, web caching and any other application that require very high IOPS and predictable low latency. Violin delivers density, reliability and per terabyte pricing competitive with enterprise-class performance hard-disk storage arrays transforming the pricing structure of the performance storage market. With support for multiple memory types including SLC & MLC flash, Violin Memory’s silicon storage appliances provide significant power and space savings with extreme data reliability and sustained performance. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information on Violin Memory products, visit www.violin-memory.com.

About FalconStor
FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is the market leader in disk-based data protection. FalconStor delivers proven, comprehensive data protection solutions that facilitate the continuous availability of business-critical data with speed, integrity, and simplicity. The Company’s TOTALLY Open™ technology solutions, built upon the award-winning IPStor® platform, include the industry leading Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication, Continuous Data Protector (CDP), File-interface Deduplication System (FDS), and Network Storage Server (NSS), each enabled with WAN-optimized replication for disaster recovery and remote office protection. FalconStor products are available from major OEMs and solution providers including 3Com, Acer, Data Direct Networks, Dynamic Solutions International, EMC, IBM, Oracle, Pillar Data Systems, SGI, and Spectra Logic and are deployed by thousands of customers worldwide, from small businesses to Fortune 1000 enterprises.

FalconStor is headquartered in Melville, N.Y., with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com.

# # #

FalconStor, FalconStor Software, IPStor, and HotZone are registered trademarks, and TOTALLY Open and SafeCache are trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc. in the US and other countries. All other company and product names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

FalconStor Software, Inc. and Avnet Technology Solutions (Avnet), a value-added IT distributor and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced that they have entered into an agreement for the distribution of FalconStor® software products by Avnet UK.

Avnet will be distributing the full range of FalconStor solutions, including FalconStor® Continuous Data Protector (CDP), FalconStor® Network Storage Server® (NSS), FalconStor® Virtual Tape Library (VTL) with deduplication and FalconStor® File-interface Deduplication System (FDS).

The products, which are already being distributed by Avnet in the Benelux, will be taken to market immediately by Avnet in the UK with other European countries following suit as and when appropriate.

“Avnet has a strong reputation in the channel and this is what made it such an attractive partnership for FalconStor,” said Guillaume Imberti, president and general manager of FalconStor´s EMEA operations. “Avnet’s market approach will allow our data protection solutions to find their way to many customers and solution providers striving for better data efficiency and protection. We believe that working with Avnet will strengthen our distribution reach throughout Europe.”

“FalconStor products fit well into our storage portfolio and address our partners’ goals. With the increasing volume of data, there’s more and more demand for storage virtualization and data protection,” said Mark Walker, EMEA director, Storage Product Business Group, Avnet Technology Solutions. “Together with FalconStor, we will jointly recruit resellers and solution providers to meet with the growing demand for FalconStor solutions.”

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About Avnet Technology Solutions
Avnet Technology Solutions is an operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. As a global technology sales and marketing organization, Avnet Technology Solutions has sales divisions focused on specific customer segments and a select line card strategy enabling an exceptional level of attention to the needs of its customers and suppliers. For fiscal year 2008, the group served customers in more than 30 countries and generated US $7 billion in annual revenue.

About Avnet Inc.
Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology in the world. Avnet accelerates its partners’ success by connecting the world’s leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers and providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended June 27, 2009, Avnet generated revenue of $16.23 billion.

SIM4travel, a Truphone company and a leading supplier of global travel SIM cards, has appointed Data Select, one of the UK’s leading distributors of mobile phones, accessories and airtime, to extend the distribution channels for SIM4travel.

The partnership will allow SIM4travel to benefit from the extensive relations Data Select has with retailers and businesses, while Data Select benefits from the addition of the SIM4travel product to its portfolio.

A pre-paid top-up service with free inbound calls in major destinations and great roaming rates, SIM4travel is easy to set up and offers savings of up to 80% on standard network charges while people are abroad on holiday or business around the world.

“Data Select was an obvious choice as a distribution partner for SIM4travel”, said Geraldine Wilson, CEO Truphone. “SIM4travel is a compelling high quality global travel SIM and with Data Select’s heritage in distributing tech products, we look forward to extending our distribution channel.”

“Roaming charges are one of the biggest issues still affecting mobile users. Whether for business or pleasure, the worry of international call rates is now a thing of the past, thanks to SIM4travel. This is a great product for Data Select to offer our customers – and just in time for summer”, commented George McPherson, Chief Executive of Data Select.

SIM4travel SIM cards are currently available on Easyjet, British Airways and Phones4U as well as e-pay Independent Retailers around the UK.

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Links

• SIM4travel website
• SIM4travel press office
• Truphone website
• Truphone press office
  

About SIM4travel
SIM4travel is a trading name of, and Truphone is a trademark of, Software Cellular Network Limited. SIM4travel operates its own Pay As You Go global network. Using a SIM4travel international SIM card there are no charges for inbound calls in the EU, and calls home are just 25p per minute. Worldwide, savings of up to 80% are possible in most countries worldwide.

How it works
SIM4travel is a GSM SIM card service designed to be used while roaming. No contract is required so there are no tie-ins. It’s a prepaid service, and it’s easy to top-up with a credit card. Customers simply purchase a SIM4travel pack, pop the SIM card in to their mobile phone, then activate the prepaid account by registering their credit card and loading cash credit. Customers can then start making calls from the moment they land, all at a massive discount compared to standard network charges, in over 100 countries around the world.

By using the exclusive SIM4travel mobile number (+44 UK) calls are also free to receive in 36 countries. SIM4travel will save money for anyone who uses their mobile while abroad: business people, holiday makers… everyone can benefit.

Data Select – overview
Data Select is the UK’s leading distributor of mobile phones and accessories. Part of The Phones International Group, Data Select is owned by Peter Jones of BBC TV’s Dragons’ Den fame. In 2009 Data Select won both the Mobile News and Mobile awards for ‘Best Distributor’. This repeated the achievements of 2008.

Since its formation in 1998, Data Select has consistently grown each year. The company has direct distribution agreements with all major UK manufacturers including Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung and airtime distribution agreements with all networks.

Data Select supplies to a range of customers including specialist retailers including Phones 4u and Carphone Warehouse and non-specialist retailers including Tesco, WHSmith and Argos.
www.dataselect.co.uk