2008 cPanel Conference Overview

Earlier this week Candice and I had the unprecedented (I say unprecedented because this was the first time theWHIR was on location covering it!) pleasure of attending cPanel's third annual partner conference at the Westin Oaks Galleria in Houston.

I'll admit, I was quite surprised about how lush and green Houston was considering I had this silly but steadfast preconception that all of Texas would be dry and hot, with sprawling ranches and *cough* cowboys in 10-gallon hats. But, I digress...

Considering this was our first time covering cPanel's event, we weren't quite sure what to expect, although through the company's announcements I knew it was supposed to be "more in depth with more advanced topics than in previous years."

I later found out this meant much more technically detailed seminars (not so much business oriented) and a particular focus on security through its sessions "Security Concepts and Strategies in 2008" and "Systematized Threats to web hosting security." One of the attendees I spoke to, David Meservy from Gem3, tells me the second one alone was worth the price of admission.

Upon arriving at the conference's opening networking shindig on Wednesday evening, which you can see pictures of here, there were two things I immediately noticed: the crowd was significantly smaller (and more intimate, mind you) than other events we had been to and the room was full of faces I had never seen before; this is almost always the case with partner events though.

On Thursday, the conference began bright and early at 8:45 a.m. with some opening remarks from cPanel's operations manager David Koston. He skimmed over the itinerary for the event, outlining some little changes in the scheduling, and shared some general trends about the industry and how it was relevant to cPanel's current and future initiatives. Namely, he talked about the growth in application hosting, the increased use of virtualization technologies and Netcraft's month-to-month evidence that Windows-based Hosting was growing significantly and cPanel was embracing this with its upcoming Server Suite for Windows offering.

One thing Koston said that stood out was cPanel's hope for a "true" open standard for application packaging. Now, we know Parallels has aggressively been touting its APS Standard and cPanel has its cPAddons standard (for around three and a half years, apparently) but both met with Koston's criticism for not being a truly "open" standard. Koston says the APS Standard is good, but was "created without industry input" and was presented as a standard rather than adopted as a standard while cPanel's cPAddons standard was sufficient for cPanel customers but not great for the industry.

"The goal is to have an open standard, one that isn't driven by control panel companies, though we contribute to it, but is open and available for hosts and ISVs. One that's created for every application," said Koston during a one-on-one discussion at the event. "For it to truly be a standard it has to be worthwhile to everyone to adopt it. When you define something and tell people it's a standard, if they don't use it, there's no value."

In an effort to remedy this, Koston says cPanel has met with some web hosts and ISVs to collaborate on what everyone would want from an open standard and they're hoping to build some momentum soon. So far, Koston says they've put together some preliminary schematics. He's also encouraging interested companies to contact him directly to discuss more.

The event wrapped up today and cPanel says it is making its presentations available here.

Also be sure to stay tuned for some WHIRtv coverage of the event and some interviews in the coming weeks.