Parallels Announces Enablement of New Cloud Infrastructure

Parallels Announces Enablement of New Cloud Infrastructure, Hosted PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange) and APS-Based Services as SMB Cloud Consumption to Increase Sharply

Hosting and Cloud service enablement leader Parallels today announced it is positioning itself for the growth in small and medium business cloud consumption with the introduction of new strategic Cloud Infrastructure and Hosted PBX solutions, as then as support for Microsoft Office 365 Syndication and Hyper-V Cloud. It is as well increasing its investment in facilitating APS-enabled solutions to accelerate ISV's ability to as well profit from the cloud.

According to 'Parallels SMB Cloud Insights', small and medium business cloud consumption has hit the mass adoption curve with the cloud services market valued at $10.6 billion in 2010. This market possibility will increase to $28.6 billion and small businesses with fewer than 100 employees are the foundation of this market. They account for over 80% of the total market spending and over 95% of all U.S. SMBs.

"Today we are launching Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure to help service providers extend their offerings to SMBs and become more profitable," said Steen. "Parallels' cloud infrastructure solution enables service providers to rapidly and profitably deliver the infrastructure cloud computing and storage services to SMBs and developers. It enables service providers to become more competitive against bigger providers like Amazon."

Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat said, "With Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure, we discovered a solution that provides utmost level of manageability for service providers who want to offer a complete suite of Cloud Services, ranging from computing and virtualization to storage. As a trusted partner with extended experience of service providers, Parallels was able to leverage our research to deliver the perfect product for their clients."

The SMB hosted PBX market will grow to $3

"Parallels' technology estimates that the SMB hosted PBX market will grow to $3.9 billion in the U.S.," said Steen. "With provisioning and billing automation in Parallels Automation, hosted PBX service will become easier for service providers to resell a full, unified communications suite to SMBs."

Service providers will be able to quickly and easily add hosted PBX and other VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services by reselling hosted services just as BroadSoft BroadWorks, allowing them to capitalize on the rapidly growing hosted PBX market.

"We are leveraging a third-party hosted BroadWorks PBX service for our popular WorkLife cloud-hosted productivity tool, which is delivered by Parallels Automation," said James Griffin, Director of Hosting Strategy at Star Communications. "This enables us to provide our clients with a complete set of services at an attractive price. Parallels Automation allowed us to get to market in a fraction of the time compared to developing the integrations ourselves."

Parallels has expanded the suite of Microsoft products available to service providers with the addition of Hyper-V support. Other solutions available include Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, Dynamics CRM, and Microsoft Online Services syndication.

"Cloud infrastructure services are powered by a number of different technologies and hosting clients buy various types of hosted applications built by different research vendors. The challenge for hosters is to support and automate the delivery of as many of these technologies as possible," said Philbert Shih, Senior Analyst for Hosting at Tier1 Technology. "This is crucial because accommodating different technologies helps hosters maximize their market opportunity during delivering choice and flexibility to clients."

The delivery of new APS-enabled solutions

To accelerate the delivery of new APS-enabled solutions, Parallels has developed a program to provide a network of system integrators that can help service providers to APS package their offerings. System integrators include: ActiveCloud, Komtet, Softec and iSynergy.

"Sonian is proud to be successfully integrated with Parallels Automation," said Greg Arnette, CTO of Sonian. "Sonian's email archiving innovation and Parallels Automation allows service providers to quickly bring to market an email archival solution to meet the needs of regulatory compliance, audit, eDiscovery and Storage management."