Held at the Hyatt Dulles in Herndon, Virginia the event saw an attendance of just over 200 Web hosting and tech partners, including big-name hosts like 1&1 Internet, GoDaddy, EV1 and SAVVIS.

The summit kicked off with a keynote in which SWsoft's president and CEO, Serguei Beloussov examined the industry's trends and challenges and discussed how SWsoft could offer solutions. Partners also learned about the newest updates to some of SWsoft's most popular products, including PEM, Virtuozzo, SiteBuilder 3.0 and Plesk 7.6 for Windows. Also dispersed between talks were sessions led by some of SWsoft's biggest partners, such as Microsoft and Rackable, which had the opportunity to share their experiences and benefits from working with SWsoft.

Kurt Daniel, SWsoft's director of marketing says the aim behind the event was to provide more open and future-oriented information about the company, as well as offer high-quality networking for partners and attendees.

"SWsoft is a real supporter of its partners and is increasing its investments in them to have success together in the marketplace,' says Daniel. "And to accomplish that we're trying to become a more open SWsoft, and a better communicating SWsoft in terms of future plans and roadmaps, which are sometimes tricky to communicate."

Along with sessions in which SWsoft had the opportunity to unveil its newest product updates, Daniel says one of the biggest highlights of the event was the technical tables set up outside the main session room where attendees gathered to speak face-to-face with SWsoft's engineers. He says partners really seemed to appreciate the one-on-one discussions and that having a smaller group of attendees helped create a very intimate and invaluable experience.

"The SWsoft Hosting Summit is a much more focused and intimate event than something like, say, HostingCon," says Daniel. "Focused in terms of really diving into automation and virtualization and complimentary technologies rather than trying to cover the entire hosting industry in two days. The quality of people at HostingCon is great, but by having less people and having senior people from around the world come to our event, the networking and the intimate nature between everyone was really fantastic. Rather than open it up to our 10 to 15 thousand customers around the world, we wanted to keep it intimate and make it a special event for those people who were closest to us."

As with some other industry events, SWsoft took time to show its partners a good time as it brought attendees on a dinner cruise along the Potomac River that offered a view of Washington DC. SWsoft also brought attendees to the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum, and took partners on a tour of the new SWsoft office located directly across from the event venue. To top it off, attendees also had the chance to win Blackberries and iPods, and were each given digital camera key chains.

Daniel says that despite the last-minute scramble to organize the event because of both American and European holidays coinciding with the originally planned date, the turnout was good and based on the feedback, attendees left with more than they were expecting.

"I think we accomplished our aim of reaching out to enough people and giving them a great event," says Daniel. "We were investing in each other and we had fun too, so we absolutely surpassed our goals. It kind of all happened at the last second, and it surprisingly came off perfectly, but it was definitely a lot of work and a lot of investment from us. But at the end of the day we felt good about doing it and looking forward to doing it again."

Due to the high volume of requests from attendees, SWsoft is giving partners access to all the presentations from the event. For more information contact SWsoft directly.