Parallels Bullish on SMB Cloud in APAC

Parallels, a hosting and cloud services enablement company, at its annual APAC summit held in Singapore, announced another successful year of solid growth across Asia Pacific. The company reported a rapidly expanding list of service providers and hosters who are partnering with Parallels to deliver cloud and hosting services to small and medium businesses (SMB). Given the importance of the APAC SMB cloud market, which Parallels estimates will grow 38 % year-over-year to US $19.8 bn by 2015, the company manifested its willingness to continue investments in developing innovative software, recruiting executive leadership and adding other resources to enable its APAC partners to better meet the growing SMB demand for cloud services. The company's accelerated growth in APAC includes the recent introduction of Parallels Plesk Panel 11, which has been adopted 85 percent faster in Asia than previous versions, thus becoming the fastest growing product in company's history. Parallels also announced its latest reports on Asia's accelerating SMB cloud markets, and launched previews of its newest software for hosting automation, infrastructure and cloud storage, giving service providers more capabilities and opportunities to sell and upsell cloud and hosted services and applications. However, the company divulged no details about its revenues from APAC region.

These developments were announced today at the fourth annual Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore, where leading service providers and industry experts gathered to discuss the latest trends and share best practices to further the growth of cloud and hosting services. "The Asia Pacific region continues to present vast opportunities for delivering cloud and hosting services," said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels. "Asian service providers - and their SMB customers - are rapidly realizing the economic and operational benefits of using the cloud. Parallels stands at the forefront of this ongoing shift by making the investments in platforms and solutions for service providers. Combined with our expertise and ecosystem, Parallels is uniquely qualified to help our APAC partners meet the needs of SMBs seeking to migrate to cloud services."

However, the company claimed leadership with its Parallels Plesk Panel 11. It boasts that partners in Asia and around the world continue to embrace Parallels Plesk Panel 11 in record numbers, citing the combination of powerful new features, ease of use, improved server performance and enhanced security. Many enhancements, it claims, originated from APAC partner feedback and are designed to meet the needs of region's service providers, including:

ï‚· Support for Microsoft Windows Server, Asia's Most Popular Operating System - As Microsoft Windows Server is the dominant operating system of choice, Parallels has announced support for the latest versions of Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and the recently-announced Microsoft Windows Server 2012. For Parallels Plesk Panel Linux users, Parallels has also announced the availability of support for both the CentOS and RedHat 6.3 operating systems.

ï‚· Improved Security - It claims to have further fortified Parallels Plesk Panel 11 with security hardening to counter multiple attack vectors, including industrial-grade 256-bit password encryption to protect file transfers (FTP), databases, and e-mail functions.

ï‚· Improved Server Performance - Parallels Plesk Panel 11 automatically boasts to install and configure an NGINX modern web stack, and leverages its high performance web server design to manage latent connections with fewer server resources than Apache. This reduces the maximum concurrent website connections, decreases server CPU and memory resource consumption, and improves the efficiency for serving site visitors with slow connection speeds - common across APAC - by up to 40 percent.

Asian partners including India were seen partnering with Parallels for its Plesk Panel. Many of those partners, including from India, were present at the summit.

"By leveraging its innovations, such as Parallels Plesk Panel, we have been able to improve our services dramatically and the partnership has enabled us more rapidly offer new hosting and cloud services to our customers," said Prasanna Ram, CEO of Kryptos.

During the summit, Parallels also announced the preview release of Parallels Cloud Server 6 Beta. This combines Parallels Virtuozzo Containers together with what it claims to be world-class hypervisor technology, that boasts to dramatically improve server reliability and performance by turning existing unused disk space into scalable, resilient cloud storage. Also available is the preview of Parallels Business Automation Standard 4.3, the newest version of the most proven billing and automation solution for managing and scaling small and medium web hosting businesses.

Parallels Automation, a hosting and cloud services delivery system designed to deliver a vast portfolio of Microsoft services (such as Office 365) and other hosted applications was applauded by the company management during the event. "Parallels Automation has attracted a lot of interest amongst the ISVs in APAC region. It has given a number of monetization opportunities to them," reveals John Zanni, vice president, service provider marketing & alliances, Parallels.

"Parallels Automation has benefited iiNet with its ability to address mission critical business needs, and taking it a step further by enabling us to quickly offer on-demand software that SMBs need to be successful in today's competitive environment," said Kevin Clark, hosting manager at iiNet, Australia's second largest DSL Internet Service provider.

New Parallels SMB Cloud Insights for APAC, China and India: $19.8 Billion SMB Market by 2015

Parallels also released its latest findings on the SMB cloud markets in China, India, and for the entire APAC region. The research anticipates a 38 % compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for SMB cloud services across APAC, with the total market growing to an estimated US $19.8 bn by 2015. To download the reports, go to www.parallels.com/smbreport/.