John Zanni of Parallels delivers a session at Tuesday's WHD.Local event
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosted infrastructure is the most popular cloud service for Indian small and medium-sized businesses, according to a new study by Parallels.
Parallels presented some of its findings of the small business market for cloud and hosted services at the WHD.Local event in October. In the presentation, John Zanni of Parallels focused specifically on the UK market. Zanni estimates the total hosted infrastructure market in the UK to be about $1 billion.
In India, Parallels claims that the cloud service market in India – including hosted infrastructure and web presence services – is about $123 million in 2011. Hosted infrastructure accounts for about $97 million of this figure.
Parallels likely conducted one huge survey, and then segmented the results based on geography.
India is a lucrative market for hosting and cloud providers looking to target the small and medium-sized business customer since recent research, separate from Parallels study, indicates many small businesses don’t have a web presence at all. Of more than 10 million small businesses in India, only about 400,000 of those businesses have a website. Recently, Google and HostGator partnered to provide free web hosting to businesses in India in order to raise this number.
The report, Parallels SMB Cloud Insights, says that service providers who enter the market with a focus on educating SMBs and building strong cloud service brands will be the most suited to profit from the market in India. In addition, Indian service providers need to have a separate set of marketing messages for businesses that do or do not have internal IT resources, and those who use external IT consultants.
“Although the Cloud adoption rate is still in its infancy, India is clearly poised for explosive growth as its SMBs are showing the highest level of willingness to adopt Cloud services,” John Zanni, vice president of service provider marketing and alliances of Parallels said in a statement. “Parallels SMB Cloud Insights for India provides a road map for service providers to help them deliver Cloud solutions that resonate to the specific needs and demands of SMBs.”
According to the research, only five percent of the SMB population use servers, while 30 percent of SMBs without servers are planning to adopt hosted servers in the next three years.
78 percent of SMBs who use a stand-alone web hosting plan intend to increase their spending in the next three years, according to Parallels.
Parallels launched the latest version of its Plesk Control Panel on Wednesday.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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