Parallels Journal

The recent Parallels Summit 2009 in Las Vegas appeared to be a successful event that was well received by industry attendees, independent software development managers and, perhaps quite crucially, the partners who decided to attend in this time of economic uncertainty.

Big names such as Microsoft and Intel shared floor space alongside smaller lesser-known vendors such as FuseMail and Doctor Web. Refreshingly, those companies that did choose to come along appeared to suffer from less of the infighting and backstabbing that may have existed as recently as a year ago in the virtualization market.

The initial dust seems to have settled on this arguably still somewhat nascent and emerging market sector and real solutions are being built to take tangible advantage of server consolidation efficiencies and managed hosted software delivery services. Here's a snapshot of what some of the more vocal partners had to say.

Cloudmark used the event to introduce its latest CloudFilter email security solution, a cloud-based email security offering specifically designed to free web hosters and service providers from the capital and administrative burden of managing email security, which continues to rise due to unpredictable levels of spam.

Storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery company DataCore Software joined the event. "Parallels Virtuozzo Containers already minimizes users' storage requirements by intelligently reusing common application and operating system modules," said Bryan Goode, vice president of business development, Parallels. "By working with DataCore, we are able to further enhance the storage benefits our approach gives our customers by eliminating storage-related downtime, automating disk space management and achieving business continuity without a heavy hardware investment."

Web hosting tutorial provider DemoWolf announced a new partnership with Parallels to create up to date product tutorials for all Parallels products. DemoWolf created a special program specifically for Parallels' partners to order branded versions of these tutorials for use on partner web sites.

Keepit.com CEO Frederik Schouboe appeared fairly upbeat about the event, "Partnering with Parallels is a landmark in our efforts to become one of the leading providers of Online Backup. The SMB segment represents an unprecedented opportunity for cloud-based services such as Keepit.com Online Backup. Parallels is the perfect match for Keepit.com with a strong market position and partnerships with important industry players around the globe."

RatePoint, a provider of customer feedback and online reputation management services, announced a partnership that will, they say, deliver additional customer loyalty resources to small businesses to enhance customer communications, build trust and manage their online reputation. Under the terms of the partnership, customers using Parallels Plesk Panel will receive a 30-day promotional trial of RatePoint's web-based reputation management solution.

Unison used its fifteen seconds of fame at this show to shout about its unified communications solution which can, we are told, deploy e-mail and telephony instantly on a virtual server. With the launch of Unison for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, any SMB or hosting provider can, apparently, move immediately to unified communications.

As the economy slows down, all IT departments are looking to decrease costs, and virtualization is an effective way to accomplish this. The argument goes that by running Unison in a virtual environment, companies can consolidate both Unison and other servers onto the same physical server, reducing the need to buy expensive hardware. As Parallels Virtuozzo Containers sits on the OS level, users can run 3x as many virtual servers on the same physical hardware as with alternative virtualization approaches, further decreasing the amount of hardware needed.

Also of interest was Wrike Inc, a company that produces web-based project management software in the APS format. The company said that now, hosting service providers can deploy Wrike on their infrastructure, enabling their SMB customers to use its project management solutions in the Software-as-a-Service model. Wrike itself is a web-based application that lets people manage projects via e-mail and the web and is said to help solve customers' e-mail overload problems.

In summary, Parallels CEO Sergei Beloussov is a hard man not to like. I have only met him once before (briefly, a year ago at a VMware event) and he remembered my name and that's pretty good for a CEO that shakes a lot of hands. He's engaging and a good speaker. I would hazard a guess that that is some of the reason why the partners showed up in force for this year's event. Roll on 2010 and a deeper virtualized technology stack for all.