(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — This week Parallels hosted its Parallels Summit in Las Vegas and, as is probably already clear to anyone who has been reading the WHIR this week, a huge chunk of the material we published came from our blanket coverage of the event.
If you’re looking for a recap of the more than 40 items we posted from the event, your best bet is to head straight to our Parallels Summit coverage feed, which is located right here.
In the spirit of the week of review, however, I’d also like to point you in the direction of some of the highlights from the show.
Among the most significant presentations of the event was the opening keynote, delivered Tuesday morning by Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov. He described the company’s vision of the cloud, and the threat posed to certain sectors of the hosting market by the “giants” of the business, whether those are Microsoft, Google or Amazon (certainly the big players in the big, proprietary cloud business). He outlined Parallels strategy for combating that threat along with its partners – a big priority for the company, since it lives and dies by their success.
Another highlight was the day-one presentation delivered by Morris Miller, one of the founders of Rackspace. While many of the keynotes at the summit related directly to the cloud, and strategies for designing business practices about coming market trends, Miller’s presentation was an extremely compelling mixture of marketing theory as applied to the example of Rackspace, as well as a lot of interesting stories from the early years of one of the most prominent companies in hosting.
Miller joined several of the event’s keynote speakers for the closing keynote of day one, a panel discussion on “Weathering the Storm: Finding Silver in the Clouds.” Along with Miller, former 1&1 Internet CEO Andreas Gauger and IBM VP of strategic alliances and CTO Bernard Meyerson participated in the discussion, which was moderated by Bill McNee, founder of Saugatuck Technologies.
Set in among the Parallels event coverage was our coverage of the announcement of plans for this year’s Webhosting Day event in Germany. Hosting provider intergenia announced its plans for the event this week, along with promoting the event at the Parallels Summit. From March 18 to 20, Europe’s largest hosting event will return to the Pantasialand amusement park, near Cologne.
While it wasn’t a session per se, some interesting information came out of the closing Q&A, about the future of the event, and some of Parallels plans for its products. Might be an interesting thing to check out if you’re interested in the event. Certainly, it’s a fitting way to wrap up the week in review in a week that dealt so heavily with this event.
