June 10, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The biggest source of - and context for - Web hosting news this week was, of course, HostingCon, the conference that took place Monday and Tuesday in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, Illinois.

The conference itself was big news. The first such event focused solely on the Web hosting crowd in nearly four years, HostingCon kicked off Monday to big expectations from hosts tired of being overlooked or underplayed at broader technology and telecommunications events like ComDex and ISPCon. The event began Monday with a keynote presentation by Ensim CEO Sandip Gupta, and the day concluded with a presentation by EV1Servers CEO Robert Marsh.

While things were quieter in the exhibition area Tuesday, presentations and information sessions continued to draw crowds. HostingCon's second day began with a keynote presentation by SWsoft CEO Serguei Beloussov and concluded with a keynote by Microsoft's general manager of worldwide hosting, Pascal Martin. Organizers called the event - which concluded on Tuesday - a success, with more than 600 industry participants attending.

Several companies used the HostingCon event as a platform from which to launch new services and partnerships.

On Tuesday, conference attendees ModernGigabyte and BluePay announced that ModernGigabyte had chosen BluePay as the exclusive provider of merchant account services to its US customers, offering BluePay merchant accounts through the modernauthorize.com Web site. BluePay is also offering ModernGigabyte customers the opportunity to be BluePay resellers.

In addition to exhibiting, and Beloussov's keynote address, hosting software developer SWsoft used the conference as a forum for several announcements about the company's products.

On Monday, SWsoft announced that it had released version 2.0 of its SiteBuilder application for designing and building Web sites. According to SWsoft, the new version includes new features designed for hosting providers, administrators and end users. New service provider tools include blog-building and e-commerce capabilities, as well as advanced statistics and reporting. An open XML interface and new plan management capabilities have been added for administrators. And end users now have access to guestbooks, forums, counters, voting, a forms builder, a photo album, RSS content feeds, Flash introductions and search engine submission.

And on Tuesday, SWsoft announced that it had released version 1.1 of its Plesk Expand product. The company says Expand 1.1 enables hosting providers to set up and manage centralized distributed servers, mail, DNS services and reseller accounts. The new tool also enables the maintenance of license repositories and application management, and is available in a variety of languages.

Hosting automation software firm Rodopi Software was on hand to present at HostingCon, and it, too used the conference as a launching pad for some new technology.

On Tuesday, Rodopi announced that it had released version 6.0 of its Rodopi operations support system, adding a new service-oriented architecture for integrating new components and functionality. Rodopi says version 6.0 includes an improved IP billing engine, a new .NET customer portal and redesigned reporting services. According to Rodopi, the service-oriented architecture enables service providers to access application processes and combine them as ?services? across multiple OSS and network systems.

On Wednesday, Rodpi announced it had released Rodopi Business VoIP, designed to streamline the provisioning of voice over Internet protocol services to small and medium-sized business customers. Available as a hosted service or as licensed software, Rodopi Business VoIP automates provisioning, billing and customer management for hosted telephony services. It handles reseller management, wholesale and retail billing and includes workflows to handle number porting, workforce scheduling and other processes

The composite of this week's news, of course, was the successful execution of HostingCon. And the status of that event is perhaps best indicated by the future plans of its organizers. George A. Roberts IV, executive director of the event, says to look for a bigger, better HostingCon in 2006.