LOS ANGELES — April 4, 2012 —
Microsoft Corp., the City of Los Angeles Department of Aging, Partners in Care Foundation and St. Barnabas Senior Services today unveiled an innovative program called the Exergamers Wellness Club, which combines technology with exercise, overall health monitoring and evidence-based health education from Partners in Care. Seniors in the program use Kinect for Xbox 360 to make exercise fun and to supplement other fitness activities such as tai chi. They use Microsoft HealthVault to manage and store their personal health information. Participants report improved fitness and well-being, which has motivated Microsoft and its partners to expand the program to all senior centers in the Department of Aging service area.

Seniors ages 60 to 80 erupted into dance during a surprise flash mob at the announcement and were joined by others in the crowd, including St. Barnabas CEO Rigo Saborio, a St. Barnabas cafeteria worker and a Microsoft marketing manager.

“The City of Los Angeles is excited to partner with Microsoft, the Partners in Care Foundation and St. Barnabas Senior Services to help improve the health and fitness of area seniors,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. “The Exergamers Wellness Club allows seniors to improve their physical, mental and social well-being by participating in friendly competition, interactive gaming and tracking their health information online. It is just one way we can give back to the people who have given our city so much.”

Seniors at St. Barnabas compete in virtual bowling tournaments with contemporaries across the country. They also dance to music ranging from hip hop to disco using Kinect.

With Microsoft HealthVault, seniors monitor the benefits of their increased activity and have the option to track their personal health information, such as blood pressure and blood-glucose levels. They also have the option to share their online personal health information with family members or other caregivers they trust and use it with other health and fitness programs. HealthVault contains features that help protect the seniors’ personal information.

Plan to Extend Program to 15 More Senior Centers

To facilitate the Los Angeles expansion of the Exergamers Wellness Club, Microsoft plans to donate a Kinect, a selection of games and a one-year Xbox LIVE Gold Membership to each of the other 15 senior centers administered by the Los Angeles Department of Aging.

Microsoft also collaborated with Get Real Consulting to develop a geriatric personal health application, which enables seniors to proactively manage their health information online.

“Technology has the power to transform lives, often in surprising and unexpected ways,” said Bonnie Kearney, director of Marketing for Accessibility and Aging in Trustworthy Computing Communications at Microsoft. “Within just a few months of joining the Exergamers Wellness Club, all seniors enrolled in the program reported that they are happier, more fit and energetic, and making new friends.”

How It All Began

The Exergamers Wellness Club kicked off in May 2011 with 22 members. It later expanded and now serves 34 seniors between the ages of 64 and 94. Continued participation is evidence of the club’s value to its members.

The club is built on a foundation of health promotion, originally developed by the Partners in Care Foundation. June Simmons, president and CEO of Partners in Care, said the addition of technology was a critical enhancement to the health screenings and health-education programs that her organization delivers to Los Angeles seniors. Although the screenings and assessments conducted as part of the club are anecdotal and do not constitute extensive medical research, the partners believe the benefits of exergaming and health-management for seniors deserve further study. They hope the program results will inspire additional quantitative research.

“This program helps seniors better understand their health and see progress over time,” Simmons said. “Kinect makes exercise fun and engaging — and that’s what keeps them coming back.”

SANTIAGO, Chile — April 4, 2012 —
Software service provider Signature South Consulting has used Windows Azure to successfully build and launch a scalable business-to-business (B2B) networking site that can reach a large, multinational customer base, including users of Windows Phone and other mobile devices. The company credits the cloud-based solution with quick deployment and also with cutting its IT costs by 60 percent.

“Developing our Gosocket site on Windows Azure has saved us about 60 percent in hosting costs,” said Mario Fernández, CEO at Santiago-based Signature South Consulting. “That is a huge benefit for our company’s future profitability and can help fund further expansion.”

After providing electronic invoicing and other services to businesses for a decade, Signature South Consulting’s leaders saw an opportunity in the amount of data the company had accrued through its e-invoicing. “There was an immense amount of information that could be leveraged by our customers, including data revealing their relationships and connections with consumers and other businesses,” Fernández said.

In addition to fostering interaction among its customers, a B2B networking site would provide a more economical platform for Signature South Consulting’s online services. “We’d been using a traditional hosting provider for nearly 10 years, so we knew about hosting costs,” Fernández said. The company also wanted to open the site to third-party vendors, which would deliver additional value and further enhance communication.

Signature South Consulting anticipated challenges, both in developing a site of this complexity and in how to find adequate scalability. Expecting to add millions of small-business customers to its network, the site needed to efficiently handle large volumes of information. It also hoped to launch quickly and keep development costs to a minimum.

When Gosocket went live on Windows Azure in December 2011, company leaders were surprised at how quickly and smoothly the site came together. It took the IT team just one week to create a seamless mobile application for Windows Phone, which the company considered a priority in light of the burgeoning popularity of mobile devices among enterprise users in Latin America. The team is focused on adding support for Android, iPhone and Blackberry as well.

“Windows Azure is an amazing environment for developing new solutions, as our one-week development process demonstrated,” said Mariano Beeche, technology development manager at Signature South Consulting. Beeche added that the valuable array of development tools and assistance provided by Windows Azure proved critical to the short build and deployment of Gosocket. His team used the Windows Azure Toolkit to develop the Windows Phone app, the design tutorials to integrate the platform components and the migration tool to move an existing Microsoft SQL Server database.

“We looked at other cloud platforms including Amazon, but there is nothing on the market that competes with Windows Azure in terms of expediting development of a new solution,” Beeche said. “We got the production database up and running in less than a day.”

Fernández views the scalability of Windows Azure as critical to the company’s growth, allowing the site’s infrastructure to be modified substantially within an hour. “Within three years, we expect to have literally millions of customers, including small businesses, accessing their Gosocket information every day,” he said. “Without that scalability, it would be difficult or impossible to follow this business plan.”

Signature South Consulting is an independent software vendor specializing in solutions for the financial services industry. Based in Santiago, Chile, the company has been operating since 2001, building a large business and client base throughout Latin America. The company’s solutions are used by more than 2,500 corporate customers across many industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, insurance, retail, telecommunications and mining.

Dell announced it has acquired Clerity Solutions, a leading global provider of applications modernization and re-hosting solutions and services. Clerity’s capabilities will enable Dell Services to help customers reduce the cost of transitioning business-critical applications and data from legacy computing systems and onto more modern architectures, including the cloud.

Dell has taken significant steps over the past three years to expand its services capabilities to help customers manage the increasing complexity of IT, including the ability to support growing volumes of data, streamline processes and ease the transition to cloud-based solutions.

Clerity’s unique re-hosting solution makes it easier for customers to move applications off legacy computing architectures into the new IT environment of their choice. By automating this approach to IT modernization through its UniKix™ offering, Clerity helps customers minimize the need to retest systems and retrain IT personnel—which results in overall cost and time savings.

Clerity was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Chicago, Ill. Dell welcomes Clerity’s approximately 70 employees to the Dell Services team, and plans to make continued investments to grow the applications modernization capabilities of its Services business. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Quotes
“Unlike other providers, Dell remains committed to open architecture computing and to helping our customers implement optimal platforms for their applications,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, president, Dell Services. “Increasingly, these x86 platforms are enabling super-scale cloud environments, and the addition of Clerity gives us a clear advantage in helping customers modernize and migrate their applications off outdated hardware infrastructure to more current architectures. We are thrilled to welcome the Clerity team to Dell.”

“The combination of Clerity and Dell provides tremendous growth opportunities for our core application modernization and re-hosting solutions, and rapidly expands our global reach and scale,” said Brandon Edenfield, president, Clerity Solutions. “Taking this step with Dell is a very natural progression for our business and offers customers access to world-class enterprise solutions and services offered by Dell Services.”

About Clerity Solutions
Clerity Solutions is a leading full-service provider of legacy migration, modernization, and optimization solutions. Drawing from over 20 years of experience, Clerity recognizes that companies have significant investments in core applications and procedures and provides a wealth of low risk, high value tools, technology, and services to reduce IT costs without sacrificing current functionality and service level agreements. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois with offices worldwide, Clerity has c

Dell today announced the OEM Partner Program to help manufacturers go to market with Dell solutions quicker and keep up with the changing demands of their customers. The program grants a wide range of industry leading partners with increased access to resources from Dell OEM Solutions to better serve the needs of organizations.

Dell understands that every manufacturer is unique with different go-to-market requirements. The Dell OEM Partner Program was developed to be a highly customizable, one stop shop for companies. Organized into OEM Channel Partners and OEM Solution Partners, the program includes various levels and types of partnerships which tailor support according to customer needs.

Enhanced Channel Support
Dell channel partners complement Dell solutions by providing value-added services such as custom hardware and software integration, final assembly and testing, financing options, and inventory management. Partners can leverage Dell OEM Solutions’ vast supply-chain network to build specialized solutions for manufacturers.

Dell channel partners are carefully selected based on their resources and ability to support the unique needs of manufacturers in specific verticals or geographies. There are three levels of channel partnership – Premier, Preferred and Registered – with each providing a single point of purchase, vertical expertise and knowledge, certified manufacturing facilities and tested, turnkey development and systems integration. Dell OEM channel partners include Arrow Electronics, arvato, Avnet Embedded, CCIntegration, KIOSK Information Systems, NCS Technologies, NEI, Premio, Inc., and Whalley Computer Associates.

Best of Breed Solutions
Dell OEM Solutions partners with key technology and service providers to enable manufacturers to build a more robust and flexible hardware program. Dell collaborates with these partners to build in innovative technology from the chip level to the operating system. This technical integration addresses customer specific needs like regulatory compliance, product lifecycles and quality testing.

Key technology partners like Intel, Microsoft Corp., Red Hat and SUSE leverage Dell’s hardware development experience to tightly integrate their intellectual property into Dell hardware and deliver to customers. These partnerships allow manufacturers to go to market quicker, save time and money on development and regulatory certifications and extend their product life cycles.

Quotes:
“We leveraged the Dell OEM Partner Program to deliver our SonaVault Intelligent Email Archiving solution as an appliance. Powered by Dell PowerEdge servers featuring RAID 5 protection and built upon Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008, our customers now have a ready-to-use, enterprise class solution that eliminates their costs of integrating our software with other system components. Moreover, now they can more easily add storage and mailbox capacity as their business grows,” said Andy Khanna, CEO and President of Sonasoft. “By capitalizing on Dell’s OEM-Ready hardware and Avnet’s integration capabilities and supply-chain expertise, we have the assurance that our SonaVault Appliance meets the demands of today’s small and midsize company’s email archiving needs.”

“With more than 13 years in helping manufacturers realize their full potential, we’re excited to announce our OEM Partner Program,” said Greg Davis, vice president and general manager, Global Commercial Channels, Dell. “Navigating the partner ecosystem logistics can be difficult but leveraging the expertise we’ve built working closely with other channel partners, we believe we can make it easier for manufacturers to bring exciting solutions to market.”

“We are excited to be able to offer the best of both worlds to manufacturers that have their own unique customization, logistics and fulfillment requirements,” said Ron Pugh, executive director and general manager, Americas OEM Solutions, Dell. “Through our OEM Partner Program, manufacturers can continue to build their own solutions powered by Dell technology, services and support while also taking advantage of the broad array of additional vertical expertise and value-added services offered by some of the industry’s top integration and technology partners.”

The Dell OEM Partner Program will initially be available in the U.S. Visit http://blog.delloem.com/2012/04/partner-program/ to learn more.