Serguei Beloussov, CEO, Parallels, presenting
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The second keynote presentation on day one of Webhosting Day this Wednesday was delivered by Serguei Beloussov, the CEO of Parallels.
You’d probably assume that there was some overlap between the message in this presentation and the message presented generally at the Parallels Summit held at the end of February. And you’d be correct to assume that – there was quite a lot of overlap – but that’s the nature of Parallels’ message these days, and it is an interesting message.
Parallels, says Beloussov, sees an enormous opportunity for service providers in serving the IT needs of the small business market. The company says that small businesses make up an enormous majority of the total number of businesses in the world, and represent a smaller, but still extremely significant percentage of total IT spending.
Specifically, Parallels sees the big opportunity for service providers to address the IT needs of small business through what it considers “the cloud.” According to Parallels, that notion of cloud services for small business can be divided into four buckets – shared web hosting, virtualized infrastructure, messaging and collaboration and software as a service – all of which it expects to grow in the next five years.
Along with the opportunity, he highlighted the threat. With a slide titled “what are the giants doing?” he emphasized the fact that companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and even Apple all have their sights set on addressing the cloud computing market.
But, he says, those giants are still three years away from fully addressing the market the way they intend to, and they are aimed at a more consumer market than the small business market that hosting providers in general would be best to address.
For those hosting providers, he offered a theory on how to profit from the cloud.
He says the largest opportunity in the cloud is among small businesses. But the threat of the giants in the business is not immediate, but it is certain. Therefore, he says, hosting providers need to stay ahead of the curve, by “innovating, optimizing and growing.”
As the supplier of a platform for delivering hosted services, Parallels obviously has a vision for how hosting providers should deliver those services. And needless to say, that vision involves building on top of the Parallels platform.
He says Parallels is the best enabler for profit in the cloud. He says the company has been focused on expanding its products, streamlining its business and hiring in top talent from Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Symantec and Dell. He also says the company provides a lot of services for hosting companies that go beyond just technology, including packaged marketing services, business models for best practices and certification for partners.
Near the end of the presentation, he brought up Stephan Fischer, head of product management from Parallels partner 1&1 Internet, the largest hosting provider in Europe and one of the largest hosting provider in the world. Fischer very quickly ran through the nature of the relationship between the two companies and some of the products 1&1 intends to bring to market using the Parallels platform.
Beloussov went on to describe the movement at Parallels to appoint engineering leaders to each of the four pieces of the cloud services market, as the company sees them, and to describe the market opportunity in each of those segments.
Specifically, those leaders are Craig Bartholomew in the shared web hosting space, Oleg Melnikov in the shared messaging and collaboration space, Amir Sharif in the virtual infrastructure space and Matt Domo in the software as a service space.
All of these engineering leaders, says Beloussov, are here at WebhostingDay, so anyone at the event who is interested in finding out more about what the company is doing in this space can approach any of them here.
Matt Domo joined Serguei on the stage to discuss the company’s service delivery architecture, and certain efforts the company is making in that department.
Domo’s piece of the presentation was largely a run-down of the company’s products, which I’m not going to repeat here, since we’ve described them many times. However, at this point, I might point you to our recent coverage of the Parallels Summit 2010 in late February, where a lot of this technology was discussed at great length, and in great detail.
He did discuss, however, a new initiative at the company called Cloud Computing Utility, or C2U, designed to make it possible for companies running Parallels software to provide utility computing building blocks very similar to those provided by Amazon Web Services.
Beloussov said, in summary, that the time for hosting providers to act (on the opportunity for providing cloud-based IT services to small businesses) is now. And the way to act, of course, is to partner with Parallels.
If you agree with the company’s stance on the opportunity in the small business market for IT services, there is a pretty compelling argument for working with Parallels, a company that is designing its entire business around helping hosting providers to capitalize on that opportunity.
