OREGON, USA: Palo Alto Software has entered into a strategic alliance with iContact Corporation, a leading provider of web-based software that improves the efficiency of marketing communication for businesses and enterprises. iContact's email marketing best practices are now available to Palo Alto Software's small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers.

iContact Corporation's flagship product, iContact, is an email marketing service that allows businesses to easily create, send, and track permission-based email newsletters and surveys. iContact is the first application in the world to allow businesses to manage all of their online communications in one central web application. It allows its 31,000 customers and over 250,000 users to easily create email newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, surveys, and autoresponders.

"We are excited to bring two world-class companies together for this alliance," commented Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact. "We share a passion for serving the small and medium-sized business community with outstanding products and customer service. It's a perfect fit!"

Palo Alto Software clients will have access to a 15 day free trial of iContact via http://www.bplans.com/, http://www.mplans.com/ and Palo Alto's Business in General blog. These clients will also receive a series of articles via email containing helpful details about building an email marketing list as well as composing, sending and leveraging email newsletters to engage new business prospects and keep existing customers long-term.

"iContact is revolutionary. Everyday we are all constantly encountering spam filters and deleted emails while trying to get our messages across to potential customers. iContact provides an easy way to keep track of the performance of email messages with its charts and graphs that are populated in real time," said Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software. "They've thought of everything -- 300 ready to go templates for your message, RSS feed capabilities, open and click through handling, bounce back handling and much more. We know our customers will never want to be without iContact once they've employed it."