Parallels Summit 2012 round-up
Parallels CEO Birger Steen used the company’s annual partner summit to outline his vision to make the vendor the defacto standard for service automation and application packaging to the channel serving the SMB market.
The hosting and cloud service enablement provider has recruited more than 150 service providers for its Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (PVC) platform over the last year including 12 of the top 30 global service providers, Steen told the 1,600-strong crowd at the event, hosted this week in Orlando.
The CEO (pictured) namechecked “the big dogs” in the market such as Microsoft and Google “that are in this open [application packaging] standard.” His position was supported by IDC who released data confirming that it also has over 50 percent market share in the control panel segment.
Steen, named as CEO during the last Parallels Summit in 2011, talked about a changing channel where service providers, in part, replace traditional distributors as the second tier in a cloud-centric SMB market worth an expected $1.1 trillion annually by 2015. The ex-Microsoft executive also pledged to get its PVC technology into the majority of the world’s datacentres, a market it claims a 53 percent share in.
The CEO also urged the company’s 5,000 channel partners to join its PartnerNet online community and stressed that its certified partners will get faster support and greater levels of assistance in helping to build better business models in a growing yet competitive market.
New products
The summit coincided with the launch of new Parallels software including Automation for Hosted PBX. The platform is aimed at helping service providers offer SMBs access to enterprise-grade hosted telephony capabilities.
At launch, the new software will support the popular BroadSoft Broadworks solution, or wholesale services enabled by preferred partners Apptix, Alteva and Sipcom. Parallels Automation partners can also choose to a hosted PBX services on APS-certified software from Infratel, VoipNow and Solgari.
Parallels also launched a preview of its next Plesk 11 platform. New features include a mobile management client for hosters and built-in business intelligence tools to help promote upsell paths suggestions for end users.
The new version will integrate Microsoft Web Matrix, business metrics, WebStat and SEO indicators and social media into the provisioning process.
The vendor also previewed a new Plesk Automation platform, which it claims will help service providers scale more rapidly through centralised management of customers and servers within distributed architectures.
