I had the privilege of attending my third annual Parallels Summit last week and came away even more impressed than ever with the growing ecosystem of partners Parallels is attracting with its technology ‘stack’, and its tireless efforts to educate and enable hosters, telcos, software vendors, systems integrators, value-added resellers and others to become key competitors in the Cloud.

I was invited to attend Parallels’ full-day analyst briefing which preceded the Summit and to moderate a keynote panel session during the conference. (Disclosure: Parallels paid me an honorarium to moderate their panel and covered my travel expenses to the Summit.)

As in years past, the Summit clearly demonstrated that Parallels has become a major force in the rapidly evolving Cloud marketplace by not only offering a strong portfolio of enabling technologies, but also attracting a broadbased ecosystem of partners.

I spent much of the event, talking to a cross-section of attendees, including current and prospective customers … Read More »

The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a full-day analyst briefing and attend the kickoff session of Parallels’ 2011 Partner Summit. [Disclosure: Parallels paid my travel expenses to attend the event.] This year’s Summit built on the momentum of last year’s conference by unveiling numerous enhancements to its portfolio of Cloud enablement solutions, including:

Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hosted PBX
Microsoft System Center Hyper-V Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Syndication

Parallels also promised to make an increased investment in its Application Packaging Standardization (APS) Program to permit greater portability of Cloud services.

What I especially liked about this year’s … Read More »

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 »