Today, leading private cloud hosting company, ScaleMatrix, announced the release of the ScaleMatrix Channel Partner Program, an offering designed to encourage all variety of company to adopt high density hosting, enterprise-level data security and private Cloud to their current service menus. Director of Channel Sales and Strategic Relations for ScaleMatrix, David Shepard, is excited about this latest program. “The ScaleMatrix Partner Program will drive innovation and deliver end-to-end cloud and data security solutions, while helping to define the industry as it expands to include new partners and product solutions,” he said in a press release earlier today. One of the first companies to join this new partner program is iEmbed Solutions, a technology service provider in the Government and Healthcare space.  Under this partner program, iEmbed Solutions can now offer ScaleMatrix’s private cloud services and data protection on the CA ARCserve platform, both of which are designed to greatly increase the efficiency of the end-user companies. Highly competitive markets, such as the Government and Healthcare sectors are migrating to the cloud on a grand scale, citing lower costs, efficiency and scalability of the new offerings.

Symantec yesterday announced that it is delivering a new approach to data protection and introducing NetBackup 7.5 with new options, including NetBackup Accelerator to speed backups by up to 100 times while delivering “Instant Full Recovery” capability, NetBackup Replication Director to integrate NetApp Snapshots with backup, and NetBackup Search to allow simple search and recovery of backup data and selective legal hold. NetBackup is available as a single integrated appliance for the data center, remote office and virtual environments, providing customers with simplified deployment and operations. -- Written by Kenneth Corbin

Samsung Electronics America Inc. reseller partner NWN Corporation, a national IT integrator formerly known as Western Blue, has been awarded the new printer contract by the State of California Department of General Services. The contract is designed to provide new Samsung printers and offer a recycling program for State agencies for the next three to five years. Samsung and NWN developed a program that focused on cost-savings and energy-efficient features, winning against 14 competing bids. The contract is mandatory for State Agencies and is available to all local governments, public educational institutions and special districts throughout California.

Dimension Data said today that it has acquired Xigo, a provider of telecom expense management  solutions. The acquisition will, in part, help to further Dimension Data’s Services strategy of becoming a full-fledged Managed Communications Service Provider, as well as deliver greater value across the enterprise with an integrated cost optimization solution for spend analysis, sourcing, provisioning and invoice processing. Dimension Data will immediately focus on increasing Xigo’s U.S. market share and meeting the TEM needs of multinational organizations. Over time, the services will be rolled out to other countries in the Group.

Seattlites love Portland. All we need is a good excuse like an NBA game or a conference to make the 3-hour drive south. Late last week I found that with Cloud Intelligence. It was well worth my time. Hosted by QuickStart, a large West Coast training provider, Cloud Intelligence is a real “meat on them thar bones” rich cloud content event. Starting with a kick-off speech by the highly-rated Buck Woody, the Cloud Intelligence event essentially took attendees from A-to-Z in a day on anything and everything concerning Microsoft Cloud technology. Interestingly, the audience was mixed. It was comprised of many in-house IT Pros in addition to resellers and channel partners. I spoke with people from government, health care and other verticals. There were even developers in the audience.  The content was divided into four levels: 100 General Overview 200 Overview with some technical depth 300 Somewhat technical 400 Very technical presentation What was interesting was that there was very little of the “money maker” talk often associated with SMB Nation and other MSP events. Why? Because Quickstart lives in the technical wheelhouse as a training center and its event efforts reflect that. See the schedule for the remaining Cloud Intelligence events below. To sign up, use this codeSMB249  and click HERE

Here we go again! As I do each week, I am really enjoying bringing our readers a quick round-up of the blog coverage I didn’t manage to get to during the busy week prior. Apologies for the late-afternoon edition of our “5 Blogs We Missed Last Week,” but today has been quite a whirlwind! I am still on a high from the NY Giants Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots last night, as well as finishing the Q1 edition of our print publication, which goes to press later today. This issue is the first one for 2012, and will be distributed at our MVP Nation event held March 2-3. With a focus on the new upcoming Windows 8 technology, the event will be held at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA. The two-day event will allow attendees to create their Windows 8 road map. For more information, and to register, go to: http://mvp.smbnation.com/. Once again, here are a few snippets of information that we didn’t get a chance to bring you last week. Let us also know if there was something we might have missed, which is not mentioned in this entry…because as you know…we love news!

Microsoft released news today of an influx of new customers to their Office 365 platform.  The American Heart Association, JetBlue, and Patagonia have all adopted Microsoft’s cloud-based suite of productivity tools. These latest companies join fellow Interbrand Top 100 Companies such as Marie Claire, Campbell’s Soup and Wunderman. In fact, Microsoft reports that over 40% of the Interbrand Top 100 Companies utilize Office 365. Microsoft is very pleased with not only the number of companies using Office 365, but the diversity of their clients.  Small, medium and large companies are