Earlier this month I travelled to several European cities in support of Parallels’ EMEA roadshow, of which OpenSRS was a sponsor. The roadshow stopped in seven cities, and although I only attended three – Cologne, Paris and Madrid – it was certainly an eye-opening experience.
Much like the Parallels’ partner event held yearly in North America, the goal of the EMEA roadshow was to reach out to hosting companies to discuss product usage, learn about new developments at Parallels, and meet local staff. Each day was comprised of a series of presentations, both by Parallels and sponsors like OpenSRS, on a wide variety of topics. At each stop, I gave a presentation about the top 10 reseller-focused trends OpenSRS had thus far seen this year, and the impact they were having on the web hosting market. Given I was speaking to a European market, one key point I made at each stop was that European hosts tend to do a much better job selling Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs), allowing them to reach new markets faster and more successfully than their North American counterparts.
It was fascinating experience to spend less than four hours travelling between cities, only to find each web hosting market was incredibly different. In Germany, for example, the market is extremely mature and saturated, and I had a number of conversations about the saturation of shared hosting; in Paris, the city was awash in .FR (France) and .CH (Switzerland) domain names, a key indicator of the importance of ccTLDs; and in Mardid, much of the conversation was about the nascent state of the market, and how small businesses were still largely unaware of the need for hosting.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend this year’s roadshow, you definitely missed a good opportunity to learn and network with peers in your local region. Should Parallels host another set of events in Europe next year, I highly recommend you consider attending.
About Adam Eisner
As Director of Domain Services, Adam is responsible for driving innovation in Tucows' domain name registration business. He has over 10 years of experience in the areas of Internet marketing and services, and holds a Journalism degree from Toronto's Ryerson University.
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