May 16, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In a fairly significant partnership announcement for both companies, one of the web hosting business's most notable supplier of software, Parallels (parallels.com) announced on Friday it is integrating Open-Xchange's (open-xchange.com) open source email and collaboration software with Parallels Automation solutions.
The company says this collaboration will deliver a "cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative" to commercial email and collaboration products while keeping it at competitive prices and will be offered to end-users via web hosting and service providers.
The integration is part of the ongoing development of Parallels "Open Platform" initiative, which uses APIs to facilitate the integration of its virtualization and automation technology with any sort of third party application or system.
"Our work with Open-Xchange advances Parallels' Open Platform initiative to provide customers with a common platform to manage and automate service delivery," says Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "The integrated solutions enable service providers to expand their product offerings and include enterprise-proven collaboration technology for the Linux platform, and deliver them to end-users via a profitable, easily accessible SaaS model."
Working closely with Open-Xchange, Parallels says it is creating connectors for Open-Xchange Hosting Edition into Parallels Plesk Control Panel and Parallels Business Automation, enabling hosting service providers to deploy and run Open-Xchange seamlessly in combination with Parallels' automation tools through a software as a service model.
Parallels says with Open-Xchange Smart Collaboration, service providers will get the flexibility to bundle and charge separately for individual resources, such as disk space, mailbox storage limits or shared folders.
"There is significant and growing enterprise demand for hosted messaging and collaboration," says Dan Golding, VP and research director at Tier 1 Research, quoted in the announcement. "At a time when some of the conventional hosted messaging choices are less appealing to hosting providers, adding new alternatives to the mix is a significant positive to the hosting industry and to enterprise customers."
Last week, Parallels reported it would begin reselling myLittleAdmin, a web-based administration tool for Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
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October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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