The event took place last week, from March 1 to March 3 in Louisville, Kentucky, where ModernGigabyte played host to customers, resellers and partners as it officially launched ModernBill Version 5 while offering up more than 70 hours of presentations, vendor sessions and training programs.

Basic training sessions presented at the event included courses on installing, configuring, operating the software, as well as upgrading to the software from earlier versions and migrating existing customers to Version 5. More advanced sessions involved instruction on setting up and operating multiple hosting brands using the software, localizing the solution to work with different languages and currencies, securing and encrypting activities through ModernBill, providing a complete range of hosting services and using the ModernBill API.

Along with the informational sessions, the event included keynote presentations from ModernGigabyte support developer Mark Garrett on "A Case Study in Web Internationalization: Using the CLDR with PHP" and TCAdmin's Kevin O'Donnell on "Gameservers: An Insiders view on how the gaming industry is evolving." It also featured participation from ModernGigabyte partners such as SWsoft, Ensim, CPanel, Hostopia and Register.com

The Hosting Workshop's marquee event, the launch of the new software, followed a period of beta testing that began in mid-January. Through the development process for Version 5, the company revisited the fundamental construction of the software, choosing to re-build the tool as a modular platform that it says will be infinitely scalable.

The new software is also built with broad API functionality that enables it to work with existing software from other developers as well as with individual modules built by customers and their partners.

The version of the new software introduced at the conference, says Jeremy Christ, co-founder and president of business development at ModernGigabyte, was not quite an official release version.

"[It] is going to be release candidate one," he says, "So it's a step beyond beta. If you're technical, you can put it into production. We don't recommend that you put it into production, but it can be done."

More than anything, the release is a confirmation that the new ModernBill has arrived, and is very close to widespread release.

"What we're really doing," says Christ, "is showing the hard work that went into it. We're showing developers, 'we appreciate the input. We made it endlessly expandable, so if you did have any concerns about our 14 months of development, have no worries.' Because the integration is there."

Version 5, he says, is all about providing new opportunities for resellers and customers. And one of the biggest new opportunities for ModernGigabyte customers comes through the partnership with Google the company announced at the session.

"If you look at ModernBill from a bird's eye view, you see a company that has a core idea and a core mission, and that's automation through software. But what you also see is all these other pieces on the outside of it. All these secondary commission streams that our company enjoys, but also opportunities for all the resellers to gain."

By offering a ModernBill module based on Google's AdWords pay-per-click marketing platform, the company will provide discount- and coupon-based AdWords incentives for resellers and their Web hosting customers, automatically generated by the system.

Christ says the AdWords program has an enormous potential to benefit hosting providers by giving them another means of adding value to their offerings. As more hosting customers are looking for e-commerce tools to support their efforts to actually conduct business online, marketing tools are becoming a bigger part of every hosting offering. Free for ModernBill customers to add, the AdWords module will provide Web hosts with a way to automatically reward certain customers with credits they can use toward their Google advertising efforts.

"It has to do with the packages that the reseller is offering," says Christ. "So there's a certain package limit, or a certain package price, that the reseller has to offer before it can surface. It also depends on certain other thresholds that are in the system. Those are more technical pieces that have to be worked out on the development side, but it's automated enough that the reseller doesn't have to worry about 'am I giving the right coupon to the right person and at the right time?' so we take that headache out.

It's a very exciting partnership," he says. "It's the first time we've been able to add that piece to it: tangible dollars of a reseller that we can give back to them."