John Zanni of Parallels delivers a session at Tuesday's WHD.Local event
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In one of the few sessions to stretch past 15 minutes at the WHD.Local event in London Tuesday, John Zanni of Parallels (www.parallels.com) delivered a presentation that offered an overview of the small business market for cloud and hosted services, dealing specifically with the UK.
Parallels has done some research on the SMB market for hosted services, with some of the reports to come out of that research aimed at specific markets, one of them being the UK.
The total hosted infrastructure market in the UK, Parallels estimates at about $1 billion.
However, 17 percent of UK SMBs reported using hosted servers, which represents a huge opportunity to bring on-premise infrastructure into hosted environments.
He says 71 percent of UK SMBs report having a website, but only 52 percent report using a hosting service. 38 percent of micro SMBs and 61 percent of small SMBs plan to switch from in-house hosting to web hosting plans in the next three years.
Website design tools, social media and ecommerce tools are the largest upsell opportunities in the web presence market, he says.
Another key trend is Mobility, which means that hosting customers have to have a presence that is not only optimized for web browsers, but is also optimized for mobile devices. There’s another opportunity in helping them optimize for that.
In the hosted communications and collaboration space, says Zanni, there’s a big opportunity to upsell customers to business-class email and collaboration products. The difficult step here tends to be getting them to try it. Once customers have a taste of these business class tools, they tend to not want to go back.
Parallels is planning to bring out a hosted PBX tool for Internet telephony, which hosts can make available to customers at a more reasonable rate than more traditional VoIP systems.
A great opportunity for hosts is that a lot of these higher-end, business-class hosted application type services tend to offer much higher margins than more basic hosting services.
Some of those other tools might include CRM, help desk services, project management, HR and ERP.
An important point is that a huge number of customers using hosted services like these tend to want to use more, once they’ve experienced the simplicity and other advantages.
After explaining the opportunity, he switched gears a bit to talk about the work Parallels is doing to enable these kinds of services for hosting providers.
Parallels, he says, makes it very easy to consume these applications, via its APS standard. Once a host has assembled these services, they can sell them directly, or distribute them through channels like VARs and system integrators, especially those that can offer penetration into that SMB market.
He says APS is making it easier (even outside of Parallels) for applications to be distributed through hosting providers. And it’s probably important to point out that he mentioned a few key applications are in the process of being packaged for APS right now, and should be announced in the near future.
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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