SWsoft Customers to Meet and Learn

• By The WHIR, May 05, 2006

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SWsoft Customers to Meet and Learn

By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com

May 5, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- While Web hosts have only recently begun to have regular opportunities to meet and interact with partners, competitors and vendors in person, those chances are quickly becoming more plentiful as even vendors schedule opportunities to meet with their clients.

Hosting software developer SWsoft (swsoft.com) launches its own partner event this month with the SWsoft Global Hosting Partner Summit 2006, scheduled from May 30 to June 1 near the company's offices in DC.

SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov says the event is the first in a yearly series of partner conferences the company intends to hold. While the company, he says, didn't quite have the size to make such an event worth holding in the past, SWsoft has reached a point where he feels the company will benefit from the chance to meet with customers in an environment dealing specifically with the company's technology.

"The primary thing that we want to do," says Beloussov, "is update customers about our products' status and the roadmap around some of our short term and long term plans and strategies. [We also want to] get feedback from customers about what they think about our products, about our support, about our product strategies."

The conference schedule includes presentations by SWsoft executives as well as by Microsoft's director of shared hosting market development, John Zanni. But most of the sessions on the agenda deal with specific SWsoft technologies in a way the company hasn't been able to as an attendee or presenter at more general Web hosting conferences.

With sessions dealing directly with its Plesk, SiteBuilder, Virtuozzo and HSPcomplete solutions, the event will give existing SWsoft customers the opportunity to experience the solutions that haven't used, and to provide feedback on, and request features for, the solutions they already use. There will also be opportunities for attendees to receive special rates on SWsoft tools.

Most importantly, says Beloussov, the event will give SWsoft's engineers an opportunity to interact with the customers that use the company's products.

"This is also a chance for our channel managers and our marketing people, and more importantly our engineers and support people, to meet customers face to face," he says. "Web hosting is very much a virtual business. Everything is conducted over the Internet, and there are not so many occasions where people can meet. For example, we attend Microsoft events, ISPCON, HostingCon and so on, however we are not able to bring our engineers to those events. Here the engineers come from our R&D centers, which are in Russia, and they actually get to meet the customers face-to-face and get their feedback."

Of course, from the customer's end, the opportunities to meet with other hosting providers, as well as some larger SWsoft partners, are part of the event's draw.

"It's also a good chance to do more networking," says Beloussov. "The event is pretty small, so I think we'll be able to introduce anyone to anyone. There will be large companies and medium-sized companies, you know, guys like Microsoft and VeriSign in there. It's a good time to meet each other."

And the events organizers have managed to include some fun in the agenda, arranging opportunities for attendees to visit DC's National Air and Space Museum, and a dinner boat cruise.

Most importantly, says Beloussov, SWsoft's goal is simply to help provide its customers with the tools and knowledge that will help them to grow.

"In general," he says, "we see our role in the industry as helping our partners, Web hosting companies, to grow revenue and to become more profitable. And we'll try to do as much as possible in that direction."

Tags:  shared hosting  hosting software  Virtuozzo  Plesk  Directi  E Solutions  ETT  Hostingcon  Iona  ISPCON  Microsoft  VeriSign 

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