In the morning’s last presentation, Jack Zubarev of Parallels delivered a session on “how to survive and thrive in a changing hosting environment” (or, “what Parallels does”).
That changing hosting environment has a lot to do with the cloud, which Zubarev says is broken between “uber-clouds” (of the Amazon/Google/Microsoft variety), public clouds offered by service providers and private clouds run internally by large enterprises.
He went through a breakdown of the SaaS, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service distinctions that we’ve become pretty familiar with over the last few months. But he makes that point that Parallels tends to make that a company like 1&1 or Go Daddy, for instance, offers applications as a service in much the same way as a company like SalesForce.com (even if it’s something more like access to FTP), and are very likely to start moving more profoundly into productivity applications.
He says the needs of SMBs have evolved in the last 10 years into the cloud. They use a common set of applications, and they do not care – and do not want to care – about back end infrastructure.
He characterizes a couple of key points about SMBs: more than 50 percent of their overall IT spend is on messaging, collaboration, unified communications and VoIP; there are 50 times more desktops than servers; the infrastructure to run those applications will have to be virtualized.
This is all sort of the foundation for Parallels’ vision, which has four components: partnering to compete; automating to survive; virtualizing to be profitable; and standardizing for growth.
His conclusion: Parallels is the best partner for you. Go figure. Again, I’m not going to go through the arguments for partnering with Parallels here – not because I disagree with them necessarily, but because I’m sure you could find them elsewhere on the site. I’ll stick to the new stuff. But I will point you to the Parallels PartnerNet site, wherein the company offers sales and marketing advice and materials (and other things) to customers offering solutions built around the company’s services.
The presentation ended with Jon McCarrick giving a quick demonstration of the Parallels Small Business Panel, which is currently in beta and can be downloaded from Parallels. It’s a product focused on providing services to small businesses and their employees, as opposed to control panels that offer just control of a shared hosting service.
More about the SMB panel soon, based on some time we spent with the product at HostingCon recently.
