Serguei Beloussov, executive chairman of Parallels presents Wednesday morning
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Wednesday keynote was delivered by two of the leaders at hosting software provider Parallels, the company’s executive chairman Serguei Beloussov, and Birger Steen, who succeeded Beloussov recently as president and CEO.
Beloussov began with a sort of historical look at Parallels, and framed it against a look at the development of the cloud model, and particularly the application-ecosystem mode of supporting a software environment.
He talked about a few products, including Nginx and Jelastic, and then he explained a bit about Runa Capital, the venture capital company he operates with Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss, as well as a few others.
Finally, he talked about the small business market, which has been an area of focus (as an opportunity for service providers) at Parallels for quite a few years now. A lot of big companies are starting to get on board with targeting the SMB market.
Taking the stage, Birger Steen tried to put the SMB IT ecosystem into context, saying there are 148 million SMBs in the US, which he says is worth about $1.1 trillion in IT spending, a market about the same size as the enterprise IT market.
Those SMBs, he says, tended in the past to buy their IT services from millions of VARs, who buy their resources from hundreds of distributors, which then acquire their resources from tens of thousands of ISVs. The cloud ecosystem, he says is changing that, so that the step between the ISVs and VARs is a group of tens of thousands of service providers (including hosting providers). The changing model is giving you access to that market.
He says the current SMB IT market is about $26 billion of that overall $1.1 trillion potential market.
Parallels, he says, breaks the SMB opportunity into segments, such as web presence services (including the original web hosting model). The biggest opportunity is in the communications and collaboration space, he says. And another great opportunity for growth lies in the infrastructure services space. However, there’s a great future opportunity in the hosted SMB applications, especially if you’re working with a “marketplace” style of offering and distributing those applications.
He describes a model of growth for a hosting provider, in which a company moves from startup to established and then mature, describing how Parallels’ product catalog is designed to shepherd a hosting company through those stages of growth, and the adoption of new services.
He spent some time describing Parallels products, which I’m not going to really repeat here – you can probably figure out how to find out more about those products.
Utimately the point was that Parallels sees several areas of opportunity and growth for hosting providers in the cloud services space.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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