“The opportunity is now!” says Serguei Beloussov, chairman and CEO of Parallels.
Beloussov presented the opening keynote for the second day of the Parallels Summit, with the message that there is still time for service providers to get in on the $8.9 billion cloud services industry, which is expected to balloon to 18.7 billion by 2013. And the key to success is create a full range of services for small and medium sized businesses.
By Parallels’ estimation, 40 percent of IT spending is from SMBs — and many of those businesses have less than 100 employees.
Beloussov sees a lot of opportunity in areas of business that perhaps tech-minded people would typically ignore. Take a flower dressing business, where there are only a handful of part-time employees — they need an informal IT provider for a web presence. Another instance is a dog hotel and training center, which is a full-time business, but they haven’t an IT manager — they need an IT provider with a variety of hosting services such as site hosting and email/colaboration. And finally, even a small law firm, which may have an overworked IT support person — they need accounting, communications applications, and they can go to a host for those.
In designing a service, Beloussov compares it to a more traditional service. “A hotel is a room and a bed, well, really it’s much more,” he says. He explains that while you’re just paying for a room and a bed, there are extras that, in a sense, complete the hotel experience such as the concierge, mini-bar, in-room dining, Internet access, and more.
And that’s how a hosting service should be. A web hosting provider should be able to address all customers’ needs.
Beloussov notes that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple are three years away from offering full fledged IT services, so there’s still time for other companies to establish themselves in that space. “The giants will eventually move into this, but you have to act now. you have to innovate, optimize, grow,” he said. For the time being, however, “They’re just offering a room and a bed.”
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