Your help is needed to collect data on tech sector HR practices and benefits. Participate in KnowledgeBank’s Total Compensation Survey. The last one revealed 6 of every 10 firms planned on reducing salary increases. What’s in store for 2010? More info.
We’ll give Vocus props for lots of things: bigger revenues, profits, and workforce all in a down economy, but it might also have the coolest office space on the tech circuit.
Here’s CMO Bill Wagner in the company’s Lanham HQ, which looks more like a dance club. In the back is an indoor basketball court (founder Rick Rudman shot hoops outside his home office in the company’s early years), two gyms, a weekly Yoga class, and, get this, a 50s-style diner on site, just in case anyone has Fonzie-like confidence following a big sale (look below).
Bill says the public company sells software to help companies manage public relations and better target those who can spread their message (along with lavish gifts to reporters – OK, we made that up). Bill says Vocus is in the midst of adding to its 450-person workforce and is still seeing positive returns. A Philadelphia area native, Bill has a unique hobby: His family likes to take trips to Formula One race tracks and cheer for team Ferrari.
Protect Your Apps
When your data center is under seven feet of water, whom do you call? Of course, someone with a really big sponge. If they’re not available, another possibility is Reston-based AppAssure; its software not only backs up data, but the entire application infrastructure. “No matter what happens to your system, we promise to have you back and running within minutes,” says CEO Naj Husain.
Naj grew up in New Jersey near Philadelphia, but came to DC as a student at UMd. He already had the entrepreneurial bug, starting W. Quinn Associates, provider of Windows-based SRM solutions, which was sold to Precise Software and later Veritas. He started AppAssure three years ago, incorporating best-of-breed thinking from other application assurance providers. Like Bill in our first story, Naj is a big Formula One fan (they’re everywhere!) and also likes team Ferrari. He also stays busy with two kids, including his teenage son who competes in horseback riding.
Adding Access
We headed out to Silver Spring to meet Dana Marlowe, principal partner at Accessibility Partners, a firm that helps gov’t agencies and contractors make sure their technology meets federal disability standards, such as Section 508: “Everything from websites and computer software to the copier machines.” So if an accountant at the Department of Labor is legally blind, the agency’s financial management software must be able to work with whatever assistive technology the employee uses. Dana, a New York native, keeps busy reading mystery novels, playing fantasy football, and traveling to places where she can’t speak the language and doesn’t know what she’s eating.
UPCOMING EVENTS
September 30 – CRTC Green Markets Roundtable – 7:30am – 10:00am – Chesapeake Regional Tech Council’s roundtable will address the economic benefits of renewable energy and integrating green efforts into corporate branding. Members, free; Others/walk-ins, $25. Location: Maryland Environmental Center. (Register)
November 04 – Adobe Government Assembly – Free one-day conference to discuss the next generation of gov’t. Focus on transparency, collaboration, and citizen participation. Location: Ronald Reagan Building. (More info)
AppAssure Software for Exchange continuously protects and monitors the health of your Exchange data stores and allows administrators to quickly search, recover, and analyze mailbox content. With AppAssure Software for Exchange you can backup and restore individual email messages, folders, or mailboxes to a live Exchange server or directly to a PST, thereby solving some of your most costly and time consuming challenges.
AppAssure Software for SQL is an enterprise SQL server backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including system and user databases, SQL binaries and the server - making it possible to restore both servers and databases in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Hyper-V is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. AppAssure Software for Hyper-V supports both host and guest level backup methodologies while delivering accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for SharePoint is an enterprise backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including front-end servers, SQL servers and the web servers - making it possible to restore both the entire SharePoint environment, individual SharePoint servers and databases and individual SharePoint objects in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Windows Servers is an application-aware, server-based backup and disaster recovery software solution that delivers fast application backups, fast local recoveries and off-site disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Small businesses typically have limited IT resources and smaller staffs than large enterprises, but with AppAssure Software for Windows Small Business Server they have full access to the same powerful server backup and recovery software tools found in larger organizations.
AppAssure Software for VMware is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows workloads running VMware virtual environments. With one price for an unlimited number of guests, AppAssure Software delivers accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for Windows Desktops (VDI) simplifies and automates backup and disaster recovery processes, while giving an administrator the ability to remotely monitor and manage large VDI deployments or geographically distributed machines from a single console.
DocRetriever for SharePoint dramatically simplifies the process of restoring individual documents, sites, sub-sites and folders. SharePoint Administrators no longer need to spend countless hours rebuilding your entire production database, or worry about deploying a temporary SharePoint recovery farm, just to recover an individual document or list item.
MailRetriever for Exchange is an affordable and easy-to-use e-mail recovery software package for browsing, recovering, searching, exporting, and analyzing e-mail and mailbox content directly from any unmounted Microsoft Exchange Data Store (EDB). MailRetriever for Exchange can even open and repair corrupted EDB files. With MailRetriever for Exchange, you are never more than just a few clicks away from recovering a message or mailbox. MailRetriever for Exchange eliminates the need for time-consuming full-server and EDB restores for message recovery.
For individual message or mailbox recovery, AppAssure Software and Microsoft Storage Solutions have partnered together to deliver MailRetriever for DPM, enabling Microsoft Exchange administrators around the world to gain efficient and economical access to message-level recovery.
AppAssure´s Backup software for Kaseya lets you recover from any server failure to physical or virtual machines in minutes, backup and recover either locally or offsite, and provide offsite DR to customers with low bandwidth through integrated deduplication and replication.
AppAssure Backup & Disaster Recovery Software is best way to back up and protect your VMware virtual machines. It doesn´t just support your virtual environment - rather; it leverages VMware ESX, ESXi and vSphere to provide a whole new level of protection for all your virtualized applications, services and desktops. AppAssure Software lets you meet your VMware backup RTO and RPO objectives for less.
