Australian Web hosting provider Hostworks secured a 6.1 million contract to provide online ticketing agency Ticketek with its entire IT infrastructure, according to reports.

Hostworks had been hosting Ticketek since 1999. With the new deal in place, Hostworks will provide the remaining backend systems, call center and agency outlets in Australia and New Zealand. The company will also deploy a disaster recovery and storage solution, in addition to business applications such as email and financial services.

Marty Gauvin, managing director for Hostworks, said in reports that the three-year deal is one of the largest it has ever signed with a single customer.

Gauvin said Hostworks also redesigned Ticketek`s IT environment, deploying new infrastructure.

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Frictionless Commerce (frictionless.com) said on Thursday that its supplier relationship management applications are now available, hosted out of Internap`s (internap.com) data center facility in Boston, Massachusetts.
 
Frictionless says it moved to Internap to support the hosting requirements of its growing customer base. Internap was chosen for its route control technology, which monitors and measures network latency and packet loss over the Internet`s major carriers, automatically adjusting traffic to its optimal path.
 
Each software customer is being deployed on a dedicated basis. In addition to colocation and connectivity, Internap is providing content delivery network and security services through partnerships with Akamai Technologies (akamai.com) and VeriSign (verisign.com).
 
"Customer success is our primary objective," says Wayne Haubner, chief technology officer for Frictionless Commerce. "Managed hosting provides our customers with the benefits of a secure, reliable and scalable foundation without the associated investment in infrastructure and strain on internal IT resources. Through this offering with Internap, our hosted customers are able to enhance their software investment."

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Message Technologies, Inc.(MTI), an industry-leading provider of speech IVR hosting, services, and solutions, has announced a new strategic partnership with ifbyphone, llc. MTI will provide speech IVR hosting services to ifbyphone, a new media company focused on the distribution of recorded and text based information and family friendly entertainment via voice.

ifbyphone, a recipient of funding from Cogitations, Inc., delivers access to a variety of information using the latest speech technologies. ifbyphone will be rolling out a number of applications hosted on MTI premises over the course of the next year that will integrate voice recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML capabilities. The ifbyphone applications enable users to virtually navigate through a large amount of information by using their cell phone, home phone, or business phone, without having to use a keypad or browse the web using a small cell phone screen. ifbyphone allows voice-enabled interaction with a number of applications to access the latest news, listen to email, search thousands of RSS feeds, access hundreds of blogs, play fun games such as blackjack, Texas Hold `em Poker and multiple player trivia, and enjoy Interactive Fiction for the first time by voice.

These applications will allow end-users greater functionality by allowing easier accessibility to information than traditional web-based browsing methods. In addition, ifbyphone is planning on deploying several other applications, including a notification service for schools and non-profit organizations, within the next twelve months on their voice distribution platform. Plans are in progress for an application that will serve as a notification service for schools and non-profit organizations, as well as for another application that will function as a reminder service for senior citizens.

Message Technologies, Inc. will host ifbyphone`s application in a scalable and fully redundant VoiceXML hosting environment. MTI will also furnish ifbyphone with telephony services, including a beta staging and testing platform before live deployment of the application. The beta test version of Ifbyphone`s application was rolled out in July and the application is currently in final production release. MTI will offer back-end IVR and VXML application programming support, as well as 24/7 diagnostic and technical services.

ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro described the new relationship, ``In today’s rapidly moving world of technology, time-to-market is paramount. By partnering with MTI we have been able to produce a carrier grade application in only six months. In fact, ifbyphone is an excellent example of a virtual company. While our home office is in a Chicago suburb, most of our developers are in Israel, and our staff and vendors are spread across America.``

``MTI offers ifbyphone longstanding experience in speech technology and a thorough understanding of IVR application development and hosting,” said Darrell Knight, President of Message Technologies. ``The combination of MTI`s
customized hosting solutions coupled with ifbyphone`s applications will bring end-users direct control and access to information using an innovative approach to speech technology.``

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