Credit Union Members Spent 15% More in 2011 Holiday Season; Study by CO-OP Financial Services and Saylent Technologies Shows Robust Growth in Purchase Activity

Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. and Franklin, Mass. (PRWEB) January 17, 2012

Shoppers who belong to credit unions spent 15% more and made 15% more transactions during the peak holiday shopping season in 2011 than in 2010, according to an analysis by CO-OP Financial Services and Saylent Technologies, a provider of payment intelligence solutions.

?This month-long holiday spending surge among credit union members is even higher than Black Friday sales growth among the same group, which we found grew 8.1% year over year,? said Stan Hollen, President/CEO, CO-OP Financial Services. ?This robust sales activity mirrors the powerful momentum of the credit union movement overall.?

The holiday sales analysis is based on more than 71.9 million transactions representing $ 2.8 billion in spending made between November 25 and December 25, 2011. Drawn from debit card transactions across 563 credit unions processed by CO-OP Financial Services, the year-over-year comparison was performed through an advanced analytics solution, CO-OP Total Revelation?, powered by Saylent Technologies, and was conducted by Saylent?s Insight360? consulting team.

?Our analysis revealed a remarkable 10% increase in the number of debit cards in use during the holiday season, the result of a burgeoning consumer interest in credit unions,? said Tyson Nargassans, President and CEO of Saylent Technologies. ?The CO-OP Total Revelation solution provides detailed payment intelligence that helps card issuers uncover hidden opportunities and insights to better serve their expanding roster of members.?

The analysis spanned 30 days of spending activity among the credit union members both at brick-and-mortar establishments and on the Internet. Some of the key highlights:

???? ?Tis the season for politics: The end of 2011 saw a spike in political contributions, up 513% over the same time last year, as the U.S. Presidential campaign season went into full swing.
????Holiday cheer: Tavern and alcoholic beverage purveyors toasted the end of the year with a 48% increase in sales.
????A season of giving: Contributions to charitable and social service organizations were up 38% year over year.
????Stocking up: Buying clubs and shopping services bulked up with a 125% sales increase.
????Popular gifts: Among the merchandise categories showing strongest gains were leather goods (up 42%), records and CDs (up 42%), flowers and nursery stock (up 40%), bicycles (up 22%), computer software (up 21%), books (up 21%), candy and nuts (up 18%), and pets (up 17%).

For more information on CO-OP Total Revelation, visit http://www.co-opfs.org.

About Saylent Technologies, Inc.

Saylent Technologies, based in Franklin, Mass., develops payment intelligence solutions that help organizations understand and capitalize on payment behaviors. Employing innovative analytics and segmentation techniques, Saylent?s Card360? solution identifies card usage patterns by cardholder, targets underperforming or at-risk segments, and enables corresponding marketing programs and metrics. Saylent?s Account360? solution provides a holistic perspective on customers across all payment types, enabling financial institutions to understand and shift customer behaviors and increase share-of-wallet. Saylent?s Insight360? consulting services help clients speed time to value with expert analysis and customized marketing services. For more information, please visit http://www.saylent.com or call (508) 570-2161.

About CO-OP Financial Services

Based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., and founded in 1981, CO-OP Financial Services is the industry leader in access and convenience products for credit unions. CO-OP Financial Services connects credit union members to their accounts through network, payment processing, e-commerce, shared branching and call center services. With more than 3,000 credit union members, 30 million cardholders, 28,000 surcharge-free ATMs, 4,400 shared branch locations and more than two billion annual transactions, CO-OP Financial Services offers the tools, counsel and leadership to help credit unions prosper. To learn more, visit http://www.co-opfs.org.

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JouleX Achieves Major Milestones and Record Revenue Growth for 2011

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) January 25, 2012

JouleX, a leading innovator in enterprise energy management systems for data centers, distributed office environments, and facilities, today announced that it achieved significant major milestones in 2011, including its seventh consecutive quarter of quarter-over-quarter revenue that grew at more than 40 percent compounded quarterly growth rate. This also marked a 420 percent increase in revenue over 2010. As companies around the world embrace corporate sustainability initiatives, many are recognizing there is a vast amount of energy wasted it their IT infrastructure during unproductive and idle periods of time. In the midst of this trend, JouleX, added more than 80 new customers utilizing its JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) technology this year, bringing its total customer base to more than 150 and total installations to more than 225 globally.

?Seeing things as they could be rather than as they are is the starting point of our innovation, and 2011 was a year that proved that extraordinary demand can be created by the combination of creativity, innovation and quality,? said Tom Noonan, JouleX president and CEO. ?Identifying and reducing energy waste is a growing enterprise problem for our customers. We are fortunate that businesses have demanded a more comprehensive approach to enterprise energy management, well beyond the first generation agent-based PC power management software, making JouleX?s agentless network application approach the preferred solution for comprehensive and scalable enterprise-wide deployments.?

JouleX Energy Manager is the first network-based, agentless energy management system that dynamically measures the energy consumption and utilization of all network-connected devices and systems to provide visibility into power usage across the enterprise and autonomous control policies to help organizations identify and automatically reduce energy waste. Today, JouleX customers are using to technology to reduce energy costs by up to 60 percent.

Significant corporate milestones that have contributed to JouleX?s 2011 success include:

????Secured $ 17 million in expansion capital to finance the accelerating growth of business around the world;
????Opened six new sales and support operations around the world including New York, Washington DC, Cincinnati; Paris; Tokyo and Shanghai;
????Launched products tailored specifically for organizations? primary IT energy domains and a fourth purpose-built for Cisco EnergyWise: the JouleX Energy Manager for PCs; JouleX Energy Manager for Distributed Offices; and the JouleX Energy Manager for Data Centers; JouleX Energy Manager for EnergyWise;
????Signed a global sales, marketing and development agreement with Cisco to provide an energy management system for Cisco EnergyWise;
????Won three industry awards including British Telecom?s Success for the Future Award for Green Economy, Red Herring?s Top 100 CleanTec Award, and was recognized by Gartner as a ?Cool Vendor? in Green IT and Sustainability;
????Expanded customer support operations in Atlanta; Kassel, Germany; and Tokyo to support its growing customer base and multi-national customers;
????Added 80 new customers in 13 countries across five continents representing global brands such as Swisscom, Vodafone, Baxter Healthcare, Deakin University, AmeriPride, AMEC, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC);
????JouleX customer, Sparkasse, was awarded a global Green IT award for its implementation of JouleX Energy Manager and reducing energy and carbon emissions across its organization.

Companies such as these are deploying the JEM technology in distributed offices, data centers and facilities to help reduce energy costs by monitoring, analyzing and controlling energy usage of all network-connected devices and systems?without the need for installing client-side agents or hardware meters.

?Because energy has fast become such an expensive operating cost for our university, we wanted to focus on key areas with the biggest potential for energy optimization, such as our IT infrastructure which before acquiring JouleX has not been easily optimized for energy management,? said Jack Suess, vice president of IT and chief information officer for University of Maryland, Baltimore County. ?With JouleX Energy Manager, we can now measure the energy consumption and utilization of our entire IT infrastructure. This type of visibility provides us with powerful insight and intelligence that allow us to enact processes and controls to help drive energy efficiency and reduce costs.?

About JouleX

JouleX is the leading innovator in sustainable energy management systems for the enterprise. Its flagship solution, the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM), provides the Global 2000 and government agencies with the ability to monitor, analyze and control energy usage for all network-connected devices and systems across the enterprise, including in distributed offices, data centers and facilities. Importantly, JEM is the first network-based energy management system that works without the use of software agents, dramatically reducing installation time and removing the maintenance burden associated with similar technologies. JEM decreases energy costs by up to 60 percent while ensuring availability and provides robust reporting that enables compliance with emerging carbon monitoring requirements.

JouleX was founded in 2009 and since has been distinguished with recent awards and accolades including Gartner Cool Vendor in Green IT and Sustainability, GE Ecomagination Award, BT Green Economy Success for Future Award and Clean Tech Media Award. The company is headquartered in Atlanta with worldwide offices located in Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, Munich, and Kassel, Germany and throughout the United States. For more information, please visit http://www.joulex.net, call (404) 567-4445 or send an email to info@joulex.net.

? 2012 JouleX is a registered trademark of JouleX, Inc. JouleX Energy Manager (JEM) and Load-Adaptive Computing are trademarks of JouleX, Inc. All other brands and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holder.

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Related Monitors Press Releases

U.S. Commercial Channel Sales Post Gains in 2011 but Fall Short of 2010 Growth, According to The NPD Group

Port Washington, New York (PRWEB) January 25, 2012

U.S. commercial resellers and distributors ended 2011 with hardware and service sales growing 5.5 percent to almost $ 50 billion, according to leading market research company The NPD Group?s Reseller Tracking Service and Distributor Track? data. While growth in this economy is a positive sign, the growth in 2011 is less than half of the growth experienced in 2010 (13.5 percent), and sequential quarterly growth has been on the decline since the second quarter of 2010.

?Companies continued to spend on maintaining and enhancing their IT infrastructure in 2011, but sales growth has slowed for the last seven quarters indicating that the momentum for many categories may have hit a wall,? said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD. ?Clearly there are still some major categories which continue to grow, but the 4 percent growth we saw in the fourth quarter of 2011 has fallen significantly from the nearly 21 percent growth we reached in Q2 2010 and is below 2011?s overall growth rate.?

Of the sales generated in 2011, 41 percent were driven by three main categories: client devices, networking, and storage hardware and equipment. These sales grew at nearly double the rate of the overall commercial marketplace.

Client devices, which include notebooks, desktops, and thin clients, saw unit and dollar sales increase by nearly 20 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Networking sales increased 8 percent in dollars and storage hardware sales were up almost 7 percent.

Some of the strongest sales among the client device category were:

????Thin clients ? 29 percent unit volume increase
????Notebooks ? 20 percent unit volume increase
????Desktops ? 17 percent unit volume increase

Networking sales got a boost from wireless access points and gateways as well as wired network solutions.

????Wireless access points and gateways - 31 percent dollar volume increase
????Wired network solutions ? 6 percent dollar volume increase

Storage hardware sales, despite facing hard drive shortages in the fourth quarter, managed to deliver a positive full year of sales growth led by strong sales of solid state drives and NAS.

????Solid state drives ? 92 percent dollar volume increase
????Network Attached Storage ? 24 percent dollar volume increase

?Sales results in our point-of-sale data very closely mirror the results we have seen in our SMB Technology Monitor survey,? said Baker. ?Smaller SMBs (fewer than 50 employees) tell us that the PC is most assuredly not dead, and their actual purchases show that spending on PCs continues to rise. Spending on other core infrastructure segments, like storage and networking, also marry with the survey results as larger companies, in the 50-999 employee range, showed strong spending intentions during 2011.?

To learn more about the Commercial PC market read Stephen Baker?s view on The NPD Group Blog.

About The NPD Group, Inc.

NPD is the only source for total commercial channel sales for the U.S. technology market. Our monthly and weekly point-of-sale reports provide timely information and insights including unmatched detail down to the item level. Reports are available for all key technology categories including PCs, printers and supplies, and networking and storage. These categories can be viewed in three separate sub-channels: direct market resellers/national integrators, independent office product dealers, and contract stationers. Over 90manufacturers, commercial resellers, and financial analysts rely on NPD to help them make more informed business decisions in product development, marketing, sales, and other areas. For more information, contact us or visit http://www.npd.com/ and http://www.npdgroupblog.com. Follow us on Twitter: @npdtech and @npdgroup.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Sarah Bogaty

+1 516 625 2357

sarah(dot)bogaty(at)npd(dot)com

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