Plesk Support Pushes Roaring PenguinBy Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
August 14, 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — While SWsoft (swsoft.com) made much of the recent news that a first wave of commercial software vendors had packaged their applications using its Application Programming Standard, not much was heard immediately from the vendors themselves.
Part of this, of course, was the fact that SWsoft’s marketing muscle (along with the vast installed base of Plesk users) was one of the motivating factors for these vendors in working with the company’s standard.
One of the vendors mentioned in the SWsoft announcement, email security provider Roaring Penguin (roaringpenguin.com) says the built-in audience for Plesk was one of the most attractive elements of the SWsoft platform.
The APS is a part of SWsoft’s Open Fusion initiative, a set of open standards designed to make integration between hosting platforms, whether Plesk or a hosts own homegrown control panel, and applications smoother. Applications packaged according to the standard can be easily installed by Web hosts using a compatible control panel.
David Skoll, president and CTO of Roaring Penguin says the company’s own involvement with the SWsoft standard differs somewhat from the typical implementation. Roaring Penguin had, seeking to make its CAN-it PRO anti-spam solution more agreeable to distribution by Web hosting providers, had already built an API for its product. Adding the compatibility for Plesk, then, was a matter of quickly developing a piece of software that connects Plesk to that API.
Because CAN-it runs on a separate server within the host’s facility, the host still has to set up the CAN-it machine, but the Plesk package makes the provisioning of the anti-spam service an integrated function of the control panel.
“You set up CAN-it the way you normally would,” says Skoll, “and then you put a little application into Plesk using their interface. Once that’s done, you’ll have extra pages within your Plesk system where you can say ‘I’m provisioning this domain. Have it go out to the CAN-it server and set up CAN-it for that domain.’”
Roaring Penguin is working to have CAN-it distributed by Web hosting providers, a relatively recent step for the software vendor. The API and the collaboration with SWsoft were among the first steps in that direction.
A Web host distributing CAN-it builds the solution into its offering, paying the regular Roaring Penguin rate, and then charging customers, or not charging them, as it sees fit.
“It starts out at a few dollars per domain,” says Skoll, “and as the number of domains goes up, the price per domain goes down, up to a point. That’s a one-time fee. And then there’s a fee of 20 percent per year, after the first year, to continue getting updates. What they do with it is up to them. If they want to provide it for free or sell it, we don’t really care.”
In the specific case of Roaring Penguin’s CAN-it PRO, the application’s compatibility is not limited to platforms that promote the APS standard, because the API exists on the application’s side as well. For Roaring Penguin, the advantage of this is that the solution is ready to be compatible with just about any platform, across the board.
“A lot of Web hosts, for example, have their own control panels that they’ve written themselves,” says Skoll. “And so they are quite used to integrating things into their own control panels. From us they would just take the API documentation and integrate it into their own control panel. Most of our effort was spent in developing our API, and that’s not specific to Plesk at all. It’s generic.”
The real advantage of working with SWsoft as a first step, for Roaring Penguin, was the potential for exposure. SWsoft has the potential to place the company’s software in front of a very large base of Plesk users. And for SWsoft, of course, each new application that integrates easily with Plesk is another argument for deploying the control panel.
“What motivated us really,” says Skoll, “was the opportunity for marketing. We’re a very small company. SWsoft is not that big, but they’re quite a bit bigger than us. And they have a lot of customers. So the idea here was that they would talk about us to their customers, and we would in turn support their control panel.”
