Tuesday’s keynote was set up to be one of the big draws at HostingCon this year - an hour-long panel discussion held at 9:30 a.m. and featuring some hosting heavyweights, including SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov, cPanel operations manager David Koston, HostMySite CEO Lou Honick and Touch Support technical director Sean Richards.
The session was moderated by WHIR blogger, and presumably other things, David Snead, who has already posted his on-stage impressions of the event (right here, FYI). But I thought it was worth following up from the audience point of view, since the premise of a presentation tends to lend itself better to the edification of the audience.
My photographs from this session (as promised in a comment I posted in David’s blog) are unfortunately in the back of a Chicago taxi cab. If you find my camera, do me a favor and post them on Flickr.
And I did, it turns out, learn a few things, although how much that related to the “future of service enablement,” as promised by the presentation’s title, is perhaps a matter for debate.
The panel members might have saved a bit of time by meeting beforehand to reach the consensus that “service enablement” is a mostly-meaningless buzzword-type term, a process that took up the first 10-or-so minutes of the session. Apparently the original title was “control panel smackdown.”
Once the nits were picked, however, the panel got down to the business of relating how it might be related to their own business objectives.
Honick, the Web host on the panel, provided some of the clearest insight into the relevant issues for Web hosting. In particular, he pointed out a part of “enabling services” that hosts often ignore. Too many hosts assemble their packages of services without consulting customers on what they might need.
The panel at large agreed that customers will tell you what they want, if you provide them with the means to do so. Surveying them to find that out is a key to building the most functional package of services.
Ultimately, the as-a-service model for delivering software is going to matter most to answering those customer needs. And software as a service should mean more to hosts than it does even now, with its hot-topic status. Why wouldn’t a Web host have developers on staff, creating small-but-valuable services that go beyond the standard-issue SaaS applications?
After all, it’s not too far down the road that hosted Exchange, for instance, will no longer be a differentiator.
The feeling I got from this session, and from many of the sessions I saw and the conversations I’ve had at HostingCon this year have left me feeling that Web hosts, by and large, are working within a certain status quo. And if they’re not quite excited to remain on the same path, they are at least mostly content to do so.
One of the keys to this conference, I think, was the idea of hosts looking ahead; picking the technologies and trends they want to apply to their businesses. This is not an industry where a service provider can remain relevant without looking to the future.
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