My travels this week have taken me from Miami to San Francisco, for Parallels Summit and Pacific Crest Securities’ Emerging Technology Summit to hear and see the latest developments in the ‘clouds’.

In Miami, I witnessed the emergence of a key new player in the rapidly evolving cloud computing industry. Parallels is not a new company, but it has recently realigned its various corporate capabilities into a singular focus on cloud computing enablement.

The company is specifically targeting the vast community of service providers — hosting companies, VARs and telcos — that are supporting the IT needs of small businesses with limited or no IT staff.

In short, Parallels is seeking to help these service providers replicate the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the mainstream small business marketplace.

Although AWS has found a very receptive audience among start-ups and enterprise developers, it hasn’t generated much interest with mainstream small businesses which lack … Read More »

I was invited to attend the fifth annual ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando this past week and was surprised to discover that it has become one of the premier meeting places for aspiring Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and industry enablers.

I was also impressed with the amount of attention ConnectWise’s executives, other event speakers and sponsors, and the conference attendees gave to the convergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), managed services and cloud computing.

ConnectWise may not be a household name in the SaaS or cloud computing markets, but it is a key player in the managed services arena. Although ConnectWise calls itself a professional services automation (PSA) provider for IT professionals, its software also helps them manage their helpdesk operations and sales processes. 

ConnectWise’s solutions are typically used by IT service providers, including VARs and MSPs, and it has built its success on a highly leveraged partner strategy. Its software is … Read More »