With the start of a new year, we look at Stevie Award-winning companies that will be shaping the future. Appistry, of St. Louis, Missouri, received the Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 100 employees) in the Computer Software and Services Industries at The 2009 American Business Awards.

A revolution is underway that promises to forever change the way today’s enterprise IT organization delivers applications and services to the business it supports: The cloud computing revolution.

With cloud computing, isolated islands of computing capability are giving way to “clouds”—shared pools of computing resources enabling tremendous cost and agility advantages. Cloud computing allows enterprises to tap into systems provided by third parties via so-called public clouds, or, more likely, to establish their own secure, private clouds within enterprise data centers.

In order to take full advantage of cloud computing, an enterprise’s management and applications must be up to the task, which is where Appistry comes in. Appistry helps organizations unlock the power of next-generation cloud computing by addressing the complex challenges they face when establishing, building, deploying, and managing their applications in a cloud environment.

Creating New Opportunities
Appistry CloudIQ Platform, the company’s flagship product, was designed from the ground up to help enterprises achieve success in cloud environments, building on the company's achievements with customers such as FedEx, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and several U.S. Government agencies.

"Enterprises hope to achieve elastic scalability and reduced costs with cloud computing, but they can’t truly do so without tools to simplify the delivery and management of cloud-based applications and services," said Kevin Haar, CEO of Appistry. "That’s what we’ve done with the CloudIQ Platform. Whether you’re building new applications or migrating existing ones, whether you need extreme scalability, high reliability, or the ability to seamlessly manage multiple disparate clouds, our CloudIQ products can help you get there, and in the process it helps create new opportunities—and tremendous savings—for your business."

Pioneering the Cloud–with a Focus on the Application
Appistry’s products have embodied cloud-based principles since long before the industry called it cloud computing. CloudIQ Platform, currently in its fourth generation, gives companies a way to deliver and manage cloud applications and services more quickly and easily.

The platform consists of two offerings. The first of these, CloudIQ Engine, lets developers and architects create cloud-enabled applications using standard programming languages like Java, Microsoft .NET, and C/C++. The CloudIQ Engine-powered applications inherit the properties of scalability and reliability from the Appistry platform, without the creator needing to explicitly build these properties in.

The company’s second offering, released in 2009, is Appistry CloudIQ Manager. CloudIQ Manager simplifies the management of new and existing applications in either public or private cloud environments. CloudIQ Manager was the first cloud application-management product to allow the simple drag-and-drop of resources between clouds, creating a unified environment for enterprise applications.

The latest enhancements to the Platform expand support for cross-datacenter private clouds, as well as hybrid clouds containing both internal and external resources, simplifying disaster recovery and helping to ensure high availability. These features also allow enterprises to more easily migrate complex, multi-tier enterprise systems.

“We have watched cloud deployments mature dramatically within our customer base,” said Haar. “While last year we were focused on helping companies migrate their heterogeneous applications to cloud-based environments, now we’re additionally focused on helping them easily span corporate datacenters and ensure consistently robust quality of service.”

Creating Customer Value
In the end, Appistry’s approach to cloud computing looks to dramatically enhance its customer’s return-on-investment (ROI). The company’s products create value for customers by simplifying application development, delivery, and management leading to reduced time-to-market and development costs, reduced capital and operational costs, and greatly enhanced agility. These solutions offer compelling advantages for both business and technical decision makers.

Appistry is committed to educating the market on the importance of cloud technologies in today’s challenging and rapidly changing business environment. By focusing on core principles of reducing costs and complexity while increasing application scalability, reliability, and agility, Appistry will continue to look beyond industry expectations to deliver outstanding technology—and benefits—to customers.

About Kevin Haar:
Kevin Haar, CEO, is a software industry executive who, prior to joining Appistry, spent seventeen years at Rational Software, driving the company's transformation from a fledgling software startup into an industry powerhouse with over $800 million in annual revenues. At the time of his departure from Rational–following the completion of its $2.1 billion acquisition by IBM–Kevin served as its Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations with responsibility for worldwide sales, consulting, training, support, and business development. Before his tenure at Rational, Kevin held a number of field and management positions at HP.
 
About Appistry
Appistry simplifies cloud computing for the enterprise, opening the door to a more agile and scalable IT environment. Appistry CloudIQ Platform addresses the complex challenges of delivering and managing a wide variety of applications and services for both public and private clouds. The company's platform is designed specifically for cloud environments, delivering transparent scalability, application portability, and automated management to new and existing applications. Appistry customers include FedEx, GeoEye, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. For more information about Appistry, please visit www.appistry.com.

Appistry, CloudIQ, and the Appistry logo are trademarks of Appistry, Inc. All other registered and unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.

Shabnan Rezaei, co-founder of Big Bad Boo Studios in Vancouver, Canada, won the Stevie Award for Best Canadian Entrepreneur in the 2009 Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Big Bad Boo Studios was founded in January 2006, and over the past three years Shabnam Rezaei and her partner Aly Jetha have built the company from nothing into a thriving business.

Realizing a Dream
Shabnam Rezaei’s dream started initially as a hobby while she was an executive running the Professional Services division of Deloitte & Touche. With her passion for Iran, she launched an online magazine called PersianMirror, which aims to teach the world about Persian culture. She grew that site in just six months to feature more than 10,000 business listings and to attract an audience from around the world.

It was through PersianMirror that she met writer Dustin Ellis from Los Angeles. Together, they produced their first direct-to-DVD cartoon named Babak & Friends—A First Norooz. The story features a little boy named Babak who is caught between his Iranian and American life. They used Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo in the cartoon and launched the product in 2006. The film was screened in Apple Stores around the world and shown at such prestigious locations as the Asia Society, The Smithsonian, The British Museum, and the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Babak & Friends helped Shabnam and her team to win the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition in 2006, with a prize of $50,000 in cash.  As a result, the cartoon received significant publicity in the media, and had DVD sales of 20,000 copies over the year.

Funding a Multicutural Cartoon
Although Shabnam already had a very successful career in financial services, she decided to pursue her passion for culturally rich and entertaining products. With that in mind, she and her partner Aly Jetha decided to raise funds to produce their first multicultural cartoon featuring children from Iran, India, Cuba, and Korea. They initially raised close to $3 million in funding. They outsourced the animation to the Philippines.

Relocating to Vancouver
Canada is well known for its support of the entertainment industry. In late 2007, Shabnam and Aly realized that by starting an animation company in Vancouver they would be able to produce a high-quality show locally while at the same time having more influence on the animation.

In January of 2008, Big Bad Boo opened its doors in Yaletown, Vancouver, and began production on seven of the thirteen episodes of their first children’s cartoon series, Mixed Nutz. Shabnam hired Glen Kennedy, an animation veteran, to be the Animation Director. In addition, she hired animators and production staff, and outfitted the studio with the latest technology. Mixed Nutz was produced under Shabnam and Aly’s close direction.

Continued Growth
By early 2009, Shabnam and Aly had raised an additional $3 Million to start a new series,1001 Nights, which showcases the animated adventures of Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other famous tales as told by Shahrzad (better known in the West as Scheherazade).

Today Big Bad Boo employs 70 people, and the team is currently working on episodes of 1001Nights.  In addition to children’s cartoons, Big Bad Boo has added high profile clients to its roster, and recently completed animation projects for Fisher Price and Runaway Productions.

The first series of Mixed Nutz launched in Fall 2009 on TV stations across North America.

About Shabnan Rezaei:
Shabnam has spent over thirteen years servicing such Fortune 500 clients as JP Morgan and ING. She has held managerial positions at EXIS and Deloitte & Touche in New York and London. Before starting her own companies, she was the head of Professional Services for Misys’s Treasury and Capital Markets division.  Since launching Big Bad Boo Studios, Shabnam has been featured on local and international media outlets such as CNN, BBC, FOX, CBC, VOA, National Geographic, the New York Times, and NPR.

Shabnam was born in Iran and grew up in Austria. She speaks English, German,
Persian, French, and Spanish. She has a BS in Computer Science, a BA in German Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from NYU.  She lives with her husband, Aly Jetha, between New York and Vancouver.

About Big Bad Boo Studios:
Big Bad Boo produces high-quality entertainment for children to teach them about different cultures. Founded in January 2008 by Shabnam Rezaei and Aly Jetha, the company currently employs 70 people in Vancouver, New York, and Los Angeles. Big Bad Boo produced Mixed Nutz, which airs on PBS and Shaw TV, and is currently producing 1001 Nights. It has also attracted Fortune 500 clients such as Fisher Price. For more information go to http://www.bigbadboo.ca.

Eulogy! is one of the United Kingdom's top 25 independent PR agencies with a London-based team of 35 people covering consumer, B2B and online PR. In 2008, they acquired online PR agency Onlinefire and launched the UK’s first-ever directory of blogs, forums, websites and podcasts. Eulogy! was the only organization to win two Stevie Awards in the 2009 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, including one for managing director Lara Leventhal.

We recently spoke with Lara Leventhal about how the agency got its start, about the state of the public relations industry in the UK, and her tips for thriving in tough economic times.

		Listen to the Podcast Interview with Lara Leventhal of Eulogy! PR...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

UNICEF: For those looking for some way to help in Haiti, a good place to start is with the children. Visit the UNICEF site to add your support.
The 26th Story: Get the inside scoop on digital publishing from HarpersStudio.
The Elegant Variation: Much praised "literary webblog" from novelist Mark Sarvas.
This is why you're fat: Salutary images after the excesses of the holidays.