They use a Virtual Accelerator hosted at Amazon to accelerate Salesforce.com servers hosted in Japan.     The latency and speed between ap1.Salesforce.com and the accelerator hosted at Amazon is vastly superior to connectivity from Australia.

The full announcement is here and many other places, but to save you an exhausting mouse click, I’ve included it below.

What led Replify to make a partnership with IPconnection?
Replify have been committed to entry into Brazil from the beginning of 2011. The impressive growth in its economy, together with the challenges of such a large country and concentrated population stressing its network infrastructure creates a compelling demand for cost-effective product that can reduce the load on that infrastructure and improve the effectiveness of the network for business. Our low-cost, software-based approach and flexible deployment is a perfect fit. Entering the market meant finding a partner with great IT skills, who understands the market and has built customer trust and confidence. IPCONNECTION have exactly what we need and we’ve been able to build a strong working relationship with them very quickly which gives us the confidence that together we can deliver a high-value solution to Brazilian enterprises.

How will the partnership work?
IPCONNECTION’s teams have the skills, relationships and local knowledge to both demonstrate the value of Replify’s technology to potential customers, and to quickly and expertly install and commission the product. Replify will provide training, support and specialisation of the product to meet IPCONNECTION customer needs or more general needs from the Brazilian market.

Which Replify solutions will IPCONNECTION promote?
IPCONNECTION will be making Replify Accelerator available to the Brazilian market. That includes the Virtual Appliance for site-to-site acceleration and the PC Client for individual optimization.  Replify’s new peer-to-peer cache sharing capability: CLAN (Co-operative LAN) will also be available. With CLAN no site virtual appliance is needed.

A Replify Accelerator deployment comprises three components: A Management System, one or more virtual appliances, and any number of PC clients.

The Replify Enterprise Manager (REM) provides a single point of configuration, monitoring and control for an Accelerator deployment. From there an administrator can install licences, decide which traffic to optimize, and monitor the performance of the system.

The Accelerator Virtual Appliance (VA) is a WAN Optimization Controller (WOC) delivered as a virtual machine for any of the popular virtualisation platforms. Typically a customer will deploy a VA onto a VMware or HyperV platform in its major sites and configure them (through the REM) to optimize all, or specific, application traffic. Deploying a VA is a simple matter of downloading a piece of software, starting it up, and telling it the REMs address.  The VA will intercept user traffic transparently and apply a combination of protocol optimization, block-level de-duplication and compression that can remove over 90% of the traffic from the network.

The Accelerator PC client is small unobtrusive service for Windows PCs which provides exactly the same capability as a VA, but for a single user. When working in an office with a VA the client will exploit the shared VA cache, and when away from the office and working remotely, the client will use its own optimization engine to reduce traffic and speed up data transfers.  

What is Replify’s expectation of this partnership?
To be able to reach customers whose network connections do not meet their needs, and solve their problems through a highly skilled and trustworthy partner.  

How much is Replify expecting to grow with this partnership?
Replify firmly believes that the BRIC countries represent the biggest opportunity to our business. Expanding businesses hampered by poor network infrastructure will highly value cost-effective solutions delivered entirely through software. We would hope to see revenues from Brazil grow rapidly to 10% of our business or more over the next two years.  

How did the firms meet to make this agreement?
Replify visited Brazil twice in 2011 to learn about the market and how best to approach it. We were introduced to IPCONNECTION and immediately realised that they had the skills, and culture that we were looking for. We followed this by supporting IPCONNECTION as they evaluated the technology and we are delighted that they are as excited by the product as we are.

Here’s what he had to say:

What we wanted to achieve was to allow users to do all the things that they need to on a day to day basis without having to leave Outlook – and the big enabler for that was fully supporting metadata.

 So – Syncstor now synchronises not just content but the metadata, and the metadata configuration from SharePoint.  Why would anyone care about that?  There are several reasons:

Firstly users can now use outlook search on and offline using metadata as well as document content to quickly and easily find what they need, for example: finding all the documents and email related to a particular project.

Also by setting/updating metadata  business processes can be initiated or progressed on reconnection to the network based on metadata changes and without any additional user interaction. 

 It also means that when adding new documents and email I can provide all the mandatory metadata for compliance, and that’s whether connected to the network, or offline. Users can set their own defaults to apply to content automatically, and add documents with specific content types that are defaulted or available in any particular SharePoint location.

 We now have the platform to allow us to add other repositories – so if you’re one of those organisations who have a few different content systems that users need to access we’d love to hear from you to see how we can help.

We’ve created a new Syncstor demo video – you can view it here.

1. A new index and block-store has significantly increased the performance of the XDR de-duplication engine which means support for faster links, more users and more connections on the same hardware.

2. The Accelerator Cache can now be encrypted for additional security. There is no signficant performance impact from doing this.

3. The SNMP MIB has been extended with additional objects and traps to provide enhanced monitoring via third party SNMP management systems.

4. The cache location is now configurable to allow users to choose the most performance storage device in their deployment.

5. The cache size limits have been removed and the UI for defining the cache size has been improved.

6. VA’s can now be upgraded via the REM and do not need internet access. Clients may be updated from the REM, VA or a neighbouring client rather than the Replify udpate server.

Numerous other small improvements and fixes are included. All customers are encouraged to upgraded at their earliest convenience. The detailed release notes are available on the support page and here.

While  my New Year’s resolutions weren’t meant to be taken too seriously, I’ve seen several predictions that are indeed serious but to my mind, seriously wrong.  For example the prediction that Microsoft Office products are coming to the end of their life.   This claim is based on the notion that there is a wave of technologists whose lives revolve around twitter, facebook, gmail, tumblr, wordpress, etc, and for whom full-on office products are of no interest. I’ve previously admitted to an aversion to facebook (I disabled my account last week to avoid having to ignore further requests to befriend people) but I think I can set that disdain to one side and still judge the claim on its merits. Could I live without Word? – well sort-of, Wordpad would do until it came to customer documentation and other customer facing communications.  Could I live without PowerPoint?  No.  While PowerPoint is almost a byword for time-wasting meetings and boredom, there is still an almost daily requirement to communicate information in the “show and tell” format, and if not PowerPoint, then a wannabe PowerPoint is required.  Could I live without Excel?  No:  no-one in an operations or financial role can live without it.  In fact I make frequent use of it for sizing, estimating, analysing product performance, forecasting.  Can you do that with twitter or tumblr?  Of course not.  And lastly Outlook. Well it’s the centre of my world. Other email/calendar/task organiser products are available but they’re not as good.  If money was tight I might opt for open source alternatives but I really can’t see office apps disappearing in my working lifetime.

And lastly a little story that made me chuckle. I’ll leave out names just in case.  Large IT company holds its annual sales rally in one of the usual off-season resorts. Late night drinking ensues in various expensive places.  A younger less experienced guy is tagging along with the old hands and decides to order a round of mojitos at an eye-watering cost.  When he gets the bill he winces but says cheerfully “well at least I can expense it”.  He doesn’t realise he’s sitting next to the CFO who reaches across, takes the receipt, pops it in his mouth, chews, swallows and says “I don’t think so”.

Replify Accelerator 4. 1 ships next week – I’ll give an update on content shortly.

2 ) Facebook users will at last look around and say “Jeez, what am I doing – I don’t like most of these people, they’re really dull, often nasty, and I don’t need to spend my time in this hamster wheel. You know what, I’ll go get a life”

3 ) Apple fan-boys will realise that Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything, was a control-freak with both employees and customers, and has done for IT what Hollister have done for clothes i.e. make a profit from the herd instinct.

4 ) HP will manage to keep a CEO for an entire year.

5 ) Microsoft will come up with a mobile strategy that succeeds.

6 ) RIM, Nokia, Yahoo and Nortel will get in a car together and drive off a cliff a la Thelma and Louise.

7 ) Google will reveal that their motto had been mistyped and was actually “Don’t believe”, but that’s ok, we had stopped believing anyway.

8 ) IBM will buy Riverbed. No idea why, but someone has to.

9 ) The US patent office will grant someone a patent for “entering of information and control of a system by movements of devices controlled by the arms and fingers”, and that someone will sue everyone everywhere for infringement.

10) The recording industry association will hire King Canute to stamp out illegal downloads.

I shall of course review this list at the end of the year to see my score.

Two things to share with you:  One the official launch of Whisple - a consortium offering cloud services. Replify are a founding member and we
look forward to partnering with global vendors like EMC, and local specialists like Novosco and Anaeko, to enable local companies to embrace the cloud as both a marketplace and an enabler for their own businesses.

More information about the launch at the links below.

http://www.businesseye.co.uk/news/article/196-local-it-companies-lead-the-way-to-the/ http://syncni.com/news/5707   http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/business-news/broker-agency-helps-realise-potential-of-cloud-computing-16090810.html

Secondly, I’m a reader of Techmarketview’s daily analysis of UK IT news by Richard Holway.  He was commenting on the fact that, while he may look at goods in stores, even trying on clothes, ultimately he buys them all on-line. Snap.  Apart from groceries I can’t think of anything I’ve bought in a store in the last six months. I was particularly struck by this comment, which I hope Richard Holway doesn’t mind me reproducing, since I’ve no means of linking to it:

Frankly I think the trend is unstoppable. But maybe suppliers should accept the inevitable. Why shouldn’t high street stores become showrooms? Why shouldn’t suppliers actually pay those shops to display their goods – irrespective of whether they sell them?

Now that sounds to me like the answer to the question that has bothered me for quite a while. I love books, music and movies, and I love the shops that sell them and have many happy memories of browsing therein long ago when that was the only place to buy those things.  But now I’m a hypocrite – I don’t want them all to close (which they are surely doing) but I don’t give them my business – Amazon and eBay get it all.  So those stores need to evolve into something else.  By coincidence, George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company died yesterday (at the age of 98).  Shakespeare and Company is a bookshop in Paris, dating back over 50 years, and a legend to book lovers all over Europe.  Sure it sold books, but aspiring writers crashed there on cots, famous authors dropped in to give readings and people hung out drinking coffee.  Even if you prefer to consume your books on a kindle, you can’t walk past the place without dropping in to hear the mad jumble of books whisper to you. Such places create and reinforce a love of reading which in turn drives the sales of books in whatever form – but probably mostly bought on-line. Something needs to fund these real-world portals and Richard’s suggestion really resonates with me.

And lastly, I’m still smiling to myself every so often as I recall a recent email from an entity with which I was doing some non-Replify related business. I was asked to email them three copies of a signed contract. After laughing aloud, I was curious enough to see whether Outlook even allows you to do something as stupid as attach the same document three times. It does.  To be fair it’s possible that you could have three different files with the same name, but even so I would have expected some level of intelligence to be in play.  Oh well, at least if you’re running Replify, the file will only cross the network once. I elected to send one copy with the suggestion that it could printed as often as desired.

I was in meetings with some SharePoint users recently and reminded again of how, despite the great usability and flexibility of SharePoint in so many regards, it remains a painful experience to interact with it unless your on the same LAN.   Too much data is being moved around in an inefficient manner, and too much of the activity blocks a user from doing anything else while it’s going on.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Replify Syncstor users can link to SharePoint document (and other) libraries with a click of a button, and have that content cached on their PC and made available to them through the familiar Outlook user interface as another folder. Access to read, update or add new documents is instantaneous whether on the LAN,  on a constraint WAN connection, or totally disconnected.  All changes are propagated in both directions between the local cache and the SharePoint library, and activities like check-out and check-in can be handled automatically.

To show just how dramatically this improves the user experience I’ve created a little demo video.  I took the common use case of a user wanting to make a small update to a controlled document.    For a Replify Syncstor user, the entire process takes 20 seconds.  For a regular user, it’s 2 minutes and 40 seconds. That’s an incredible difference, and the poor user doesn’t really have the option to do anything else other than watch while the document is downloaded and opened, and then saved back to SharePoint.  Check it out.

So those that have to manage the real-world situation know that WAN Optimization is a life-saver.

So now you know what to ask Santa for:  Replify Accelerator and Replify Syncstor.

and btw, before you head to Best Buy, there is no such vacuum cleaner. But if there was, it would suck.