If you missed Parallels Summit 2013, or if you want to relive the great ideas, the keynote videos and breakout sessions presentations are posted and available for downloading and viewing. Some of the compelling topics from this year’s event include:

• ·         Next generation solutions for the next generation cloud, Keynote presentation, Birger Steen, CEO, Parallels
• ·         Top trends you must consider to compete in the cloud, Parallels SMB Insights 2013
• ·         Introducing Parallels Cloud Server and its advantages
• ·         Enabling bundles of cloud services with APS 2.0

And, you will find much more rich content from Parallels Summit 2013, all right here.

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

 

Over the last few years my team has managed releases and launches of multiple products and product updates each quarter. This volume of launch activity requires an extremely well -thought through and well-orchestrated product launch process. 

 

One of my guiding principles for the launch orchestration is the well-tested military concept of same-time-on-point or STOP. This idea originally described a coordinated artillery attack of many weapons on a single target. In our less-violent world of marketing, STOP points to the need to coordinate a time sequence of marketing activities against a target audience for the maximum impact at the product launch.

 

STOP is equally relevant for a product or service launch. When followed and implemented, it makes a difference not only at the enterprise-size company, but also for an ambitious small business marketing a new product or service. I have found that if you fail to follow this principle your team at best wastes energy and at worst, confuses and upsets customers which can do real damage to the business. There are three key elements you need to remember in order to make use of STOP:

 

1. Understand your target audience, purchase behaviors, needs and wants and other characteristics (your point of attack).
2. Carefully select the levers (or weapons in your arsenal if you want to stay with the military analogy) you will use in delivering the product launch.
3. Design the timing and orchestration of the launch events, which includes consideration of not only simultaneity, but also of the sequence.

 

Understand your Target Audience

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” … and if you do not know who you want to engage with, any stranger will do. Knowing about your audience not only allows you to talk to the right people but will also give you an opportunity to tailor your message to that audience, choose your influence angles and ensure that your message will resonate.

 

The failure of many launches results not from ignoring that fact (it is quite obvious), but by either making an assumption about the audience and its characteristics and never testing it, or by having a launch team work without a common understanding and agreement on who the audience is. The result is disjointed message and energy devoted to talk to secondary audiences that could be safely addressed later in the product acceptance cycle.

 

Regardless of your tactics for identifying and understanding a launch target audience my advice to you is the following:

 

–          Come to an early agreement with your launch team and stakeholder on the target audience

–          Be thorough in your audience description. I have seen too many target audience documents with no description beyond “IT professional” or “consumer”.  If you cannot describe characteristic behaviors of your audience, what they do, or what would do with your product, or do not understand what they read and listen to, and who they trust, you have to go back to the drawing board on the understanding of the target audience. A good litmus test here is being able to say that you personally talked to 10-100 customers that you call a primary audience for your product.

–          Lead any conversations on messaging, targeting or orchestration with a check against a target audience

 

If your resources and time permit, a powerful extension of this method is possible with the development of “personas” representing your core audience types. These help you not only create audience consistency, but also ensure that you are messaging and marketing to a purpose selected group of customers. For more on personas see the most recent article by Christine Birkner.

 

Selection of Marketing Levers

“I said it very loud and clear; I went and shouted in his ear.” So now that you know who you want to talk to and you understand their preferences, behaviors and hangouts, it is time to choose your weapons – your marketing levers. But how do you know which of the many tools at your disposal will work the best? Here is a few of rules to follow:

 

1. Choose the lever closest to the target. If your sales force (either enterprise or inside sales) can scale and deliver your message personally, pick that over any umbrella marketing tactic. 
2. Mix influence channels with direct channels. Your sales guys will do the best job positioning your product but they need support from a trusted source outside of your organization.
3. Marketing ROI is king but do not cut your marketing levers to the “required minimum” to achieve your goals. The cost of extending the “required minimum” with another channel is usually very low but cost of going just below the success threshold always results in a failed launch.

 

Timing and orchestration

“What I tell you three times is true.” Now you know “who” and “how” and it is time to address the question of when. In the mobile and social driven world, timing is more important than ever and poorly timed marketing messages have low probability of making an impact.

 

The best way to start is to make sure your controlled (Owned Media) side of the message orchestration is managed from the very beginning of the launch process and that all of your internal resources are ready and set for the launch timeline. This includes not only all control communication channels  like web, sales training and readiness, and leveraging your engineering resources including your internal evangelists, but also the full involvement of other structures of the organization like support and office facilities.

 

The external orchestration (earned and paid media) will require preparation and development of the needed communication channels, coordination with organizations and individuals who you do not fully control and orchestration of buzz and viral network effects that cannot be timed or predicted. Here are a few things to consider:

 

–          Owned media will depend on breadth and depth of your social media networks developed prior to launch. Make sure you have a full inventory of what is available and that you understand strength of your channels. Be able to answer these questions:

• o   Are your abilities limited to delivering a press release? –
• o   Can your organization generate strong content? –
• o   Can you deliver consistent content across all your owned media outlets from a website and blog to the mobile site?

 

–          Paid media is dependent on your brand recognition and, of course, your budget so make sure that you fully understand the ROI on your marketing spend and secure funds to drive needed paid search, sponsorships, and advertising.

 

–          Earned media will be the most impactful but earned media comes from a well-executed launch and a great product. It also depends on your ability to gain credibility with core supporters starting from professional commentators, press, analysts, and bloggers. It also requires the real time ability to listen and respond to the commentary so that you can support active advocates of the product. For more on product advocacy see a great blog by Dion Hinchcliffe.

 

Putting it all together

“Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself.”  As a final step you should map your orchestrated marketing levers against your target audience and (if you developed them) personas and sequence their interaction with the message. Here is how it may look for you.

 

Your target customer will be approached by a sales person with a personalized message and handed and case study related to product performance. He will be given an opportunity to test your product. He will then look for the product recommendation in social media, where he will find relevant data and insights provided by your product evangelists. If he reaches out for a formal 3^rd party validation he will receive an analyst report about the company and new product. At the same time formal media including industry relevant publications as well as bloggers will be providing first independent commentary on the value of the product. Any web search about the product will not only point your customer to your product site but will also now have rich independent and trusted media content surrounding it…

 

The purpose for all this orchestration

“Everything has got a moral if you can only find it.” My parting message for you is on the question of “why”. I would hope that at this point in the process, you would have this one figure out. If not, it is never too late. I like to revisit my launch objectives after initial planning process is completed. Often objectives for delivering a launch change by the time you are ready to deliver a product to your customers and additionally, you would be surprised how often the original purpose is lost in the planning process leading to execution that no longer matches the business purpose.

 

And the outcome

“And thick and fast they came at last, / And more, and more, and more” … that is if you have done your job well.

Parallels today announced it was named an IBM Beacon Award Finalist in the “Best Industry Solution for Telecommunications” category. This prestigious honor is awarded each year to a select number of IBM Business Partners to recognize information technology excellence, commitment to skills attainment, industry knowledge and innovative solutions based on IBM products and services.

 

The Beacon Awards are an important element of IBM’s Business Partner recognition program. Chosen from among hundreds of nominations by leading industry journalists, analysts and IBM executives, Beacon Award winners have set the standard for business excellence, innovative technology solutions, industry knowledge and client satisfaction. The IBM Beacon Awards provide a wide range of industry recognition, increased visibility and promotional opportunities to award winners and finalists.

 

Being a Beacon Award Finalist in the Telecommunications category is quite an honor to Parallels. It highlights our commitment to IBM as well as our joint efforts to provide the telecommunications industry with technical solutions and expertise for launching and managing cloud services. We look forward to continuing to work with IBM to drive success in the cloud for our joint customers.

 

For more information about the IBM Beacon Awards, including information about winners and finalists, please visit the IBM Beacon Awards site.

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

 

Cloud infrastructure is now available in two different flavors.

–          Small Cloud (virtual private server and cloud server), and

–          Big Cloud (datacenter in the cloud)

 

Small cloud is all about delivering a flexible compute unit. Virtual Private Server enables small cloud with a compute instance available from a provider with predefined set of resources, and prepaid for a set period of time. Cloud Server delivers small cloud as an elastic compute instance, pre-paid or available on an hourly usage basis, self-healing, and highly available.

 

Big cloud, on the other hand delivers infinite scalability, complete pay per usage model, high availability and data center level durability. Big cloud mimics an on-premise datacenter with the added options of multi-tenancy and hybrid architecture (ability to stretch workloads between on-premise and cloud).

 

For most SMB and many enterprise IT needs you do not need an infinitely elastic and scalable, priced by the millisecond big cloud.  The new breed of virtualization can deliver on most of the cloud server requirements, closing the gap between virtual private server and cloud server, further improving small cloud offerings.   

 

–          Most compute tasks and workloads have predictable granularity (size) and spikiness

–          At low cost the value of elasticity goes down to zero  

–          You can get most of the elasticity benefits out of new breed of virtualization technology without invoking a cloud genie

–          You do not need a cloud to convert CAPEX into OPEX

 

Granularity

We always knew that the cloud would be a perfect solution if your workload or application required a copious amount of compute power and you either could not predict exactly how much, or the “how much” wildly fluctuated. Saving just 10% of your hardware expense on these massive enterprise workloads is worth millions and justifies the corresponding cloud migration.

 

The reality of many applications, however is that they have predictable usage patterns and more importantly that they can be delivered from one or just a few pre-sized containers or VMs. With the growth of compute power in virtual servers, the size of the compute tasks that can be flexibly managed from within a single server has also increased.  Because virtual servers have an increased compute power, a number of workloads and applications which once required a big-cloud solution, now work perfectly within containers and VMs.

 

Low cost

With container-based VPSs available to SMBs at $20-$50 range, the benefit of cloud usage and related cost savings are just not worth the trouble. 10% savings on 20$ investment simply does not matter unless you are desperate for a latte. If anything the opposite maybe happening with SMBs willing to invest in hosted dedicated servers, because value of the applications they are running is so much higher than cost of a hosted box. 

 

Elastic Virtualization

Virtualization by itself is now cloudy enough to eliminate the need for the cloudiness at the next level of the stack. VMs can be migrated live to servers with adequate resources; containers can be scaled for memory and CPU without shutting down. With technologies like Parallels Cloud Storage, storage resources can be added to a container or VM as needed and on the fly. These technologies allow for flexible provisioning where elasticity is built into the containers and VMs directly. For more on that see my previous blog on new breed of container virtualization.

 

CAPEX conversion

And finally, do you really need a cloud to flexibly lease your compute resources? Hosters have been offering this option to SMBs for the last 10 years. A container or a VM can be rented from an infrastructure provider on a monthly basis and flexible container and VM payments are now extended to hourly granularity.

 

So who needs a big cloud? I do not think much changed here since the early years of the cloud wave. The above-virtualization-layer clouds are still needed in all massive data scenarios:

–          Massive applications with unpredictable usage fluctuations

–          Massive applications with unpredictable growth patterns and need for fully automated scaling

–          Overflow scenarios or what industry our describes as cloud bursting

 

Big clouds are for big data. What really changed is applicability of small cloud to the needs of simple workloads in the enterprise and most of workloads of the small and business businesses. This means that until SMB IT needs can be fulfilled from a SaaS layer, small cloud will be the engine of growth for the cloud providers delivering infrastructure services in both SMB and the enterprise space.

 

Integrated products from Parallels, such as website building tools and antivirus and antispam solutions provide you the ability to differentiate your services and increase Average Revenue per User – so building consumer preference for Parallels Plesk Panel and related Parallels products can help you grow your business.

Now Parallels is making such growth easier with our new Get Growing with Parallels Plesk Panel – Marketing Resource Center. The center provides a wealth of resources to help you position, promote, and evaluate Parallels Plesk Panel on your own website. These include product messaging texts, promotional banners, data sheets, logos, ready-to-use and customizable point-of-purchase brochures, a hands-on demo integration guide, best practices white papers, and more. The resource center will help you learn more about Parallels Plesk Panel and related add-ons, get to market quickly with ready-to-use marketing resources, and grow your revenues with integrated add-on products. So check it out here – and get growing with Parallels Plesk Panel.   If you have not signed up for PartnerNet yet, register now to take advantage of all these resources.  

 

Let us know if there are other Product or Marketing Resources you need by adding a comment to this post.

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

 

Hypervisors were the right solution for the enterprise. Triple gains in efficiency over standard servers with added bonus of simplified manageability made it a king of the IT hill.  When ROI calculation can be done on the back of a napkin and IT can show the CEO millions in cost savings, problems are overlooked, careers are made, software vendors grow to multi-billion valuations and technology adoption jets to supersonic speeds. But a perfect solution for a cost center is not enough for a profit driven business.

 

The hosting business model depends on the ability to satisfy needs of customers not bound to annual budgets or locked to a single IT provider. Customers who have a choice. A choice of provider, cost, and performance for the solution they need. To profitably satisfy these needs, hosters use an alternative virtualization solution, container virtualization. The reason for that is that containers have a 3x efficiency advantage over hypervisors. Unlike the IT cost center, hosting providers need a high-density virtualization solution to compete in the market.  Container virtualization had no equal in hosting scenarios where efficiency matters.

 

In the pre-cloud enterprise, container usage was limited to specialized high density and performance scenarios like technical computing. Now cloud puts a new demand on virtualization in both enterprise IT and hosting worlds and for the first time brings these two separate worlds closer together. No matter where applied the cloud requires high density, instant provisioning, elasticity, and portability.

 

These requirements are now met by a new breed of container technology. Already, containers are powering Google search, Facebook sites, and internet banking in addition to hosting businesses. These new containers come equipped with optimized memory, rebootless updates and not only maintain the 3x performance advantage over hypervisors but further extend it.

 

The latest and most impactful cloud containers innovation comes in the form of a container in a file enabling simple backup, migrations, geo replication, and as demonstrated with Parallels Cloud Storage, High Availability solutions.  The new generation of containers show advantage over hypervisors in most cloud scenarios and for most user types, solidifying the container position in the hosting space and opening a new opportunity for container powered clouds and the enterprise.

by, Vidya Ravichandran, Founder and President, GlowTouch Technologies

 

The promise of cloud computing has been plastered on every industry and technology outlet imaginable. The word “cloud” itself is overused and often applied in disparate, and even contradictory, contexts.  As technology professionals and service providers, it’s our job – our responsibility really – to filter through the marketing jargon, the sales fluff, and the rampant hype to fundamentally examine what the cloud, namely cloud-based infrastructure, can offer our business (and more importantly, our clients!).

 

It’s no secret that cloud technology has shifted the way many hosters approach their infrastructure planning challenges. Mounting pressure to “do more with less” and a fiercely competitive environment has forced the whole industry to become more savvy and resourceful.

 

A “rent-as-you-go” infrastructure is certainly appealing in today’s rapidly changing world. Cloud-based infrastructure allows hosting providers to leverage flexible, secure environments while keeping staffing lean and CapEx down. Plus, they provide improved speed-to-market, wide accessibility, redundancy, and syndication capabilities that traditional datacenters may not be able to offer. 

 

However, while back-end infrastructure configurations produce legitimate concerns for service providers (costs, maintenance, support, etc.), the front-end customer experience must remain top of mind. Today’s market increasingly demands “always on” service and hyper-responsive support. Thus, it’s the obligation of service providers to explore infrastructure configurations that allow them to expand in new directions quickly while delivering superior value and service to their customers. The notion of hybrid and diversified cloud infrastructure has emerged as a recent and potentially viable consideration for service providers looking to exploit the cloud to their customer’s advantage.

 

What factors should you consider when evaluating your organization’s current and future infrastructure plans? How can hosting providers effectively service and maintain their infrastructure to deliver high-quality services to their clients? How will a purely cloud-based infrastructure impact your customers’ user experience? How can I find a partner to help me implement, upgrade and manage my changing infrastructure?

 

These are just a few of the questions that service providers must thoroughly examine in order to determine how to best configure their infrastructure in a way that lets them quickly and effectively respond to evolving customer demands.

by Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

 

Lifestyle hosting is where many of the great hosting companies began. The first few customers, managed from the kitchen table, hosting begins as a hobby to express creativity and business acumen. For many this is also where hosting stays and has the most appeal. A lifestyle choice.

 

But for some this is just the beginning to life-long growth and the first step into building a business that can feed a family, pay for college, and maybe build a family legacy. 

 

For both the lifestyle hosters  and those who want to keep growing, single-server-panel technology is the definitive starting point. It is easy to setup, available on both Linux and Windows, has a simple user interface and management console and in most cases stays up-to-date with latest technology like support for IPV6 and services beyond shared hosting.

 

For lifestyle hosters this is all that is needed – the ultimate solution. For professional hosters it works well with the first few hundred customers. It then becomes the biggest obstacle to growth and the hoster’s worst enemy.

 

Key to growing at the ~ 1k user level is personal time. At this stage in the development of the hosting business money is still short and demands on the personal time of an owner become extremely high. Growth requires focus on customer acquisition but this time is simply not available, eaten away by the administrative tasks of managing multiple servers.  When you are running a hosting business with 5+ servers,  your day is spend on logging and re-logging; managing mail software n-times over; patching OS and apps; restoring data, and managing AV software.

 

The result is frustration, and slow or no-growth and in some cases the demise of hosting business when owners overreach and overstretch. This should not and need not happen. And the single-server-panel is to blame.

 

A solution to that problem is a hosting infrastructure that can grow with the needs of a hosting business, scale without creating administrative overhead with each server added, and be open to new services module.

 

Parallels Plesk Automation is a brand new solution that tackles this problem. It leverages learnings from the early multi-server solutions like Parallels Business Automation Standard, Parallels expand and Parallels H-Sphere products and combines it with the enterprise class architecture of Parallels Automation and the usability of Parallels Plesk Panel technology. The result is a multi-server hosting solution that easily scales from one server to one hundred, reduces administration overhead by providing administration of the complete hosting infrastructure from the single pane of glass, improves security of the system by creating a new level of isolation between the nodes, and drives performance of the system up with node optimization.

 

For professional hosters this means breaking “the glass ceiling” of single-server hosting. With low administration, the owner of a growing hosting business can devote more time to customer acquisition and will finally break through the 1000 customer barrier. For larger hosters, it means deep optimization of infrastructure and new wave of growth. A consistent code base from the single server Plesk Panel through Plesk Automation all the way to a telco-ready Parallels Automation ensures not only unblocked growth potential but also an opportunity for a smooth exit strategy if the owner chooses to sell and a business needs to be integrated into a larger provider infrastructure.

 

Rapidly growing consumption of cloud services by small businesses creates plenty of space for a professional hosting business to succeed and grow. With Parallels Plesk Automation, they now have a platform to base that growth on.

 

 

by Matt Vasey, Senior Director of System Integrator Alliances

 

Parallels has teamed up with IBM to provide a unique solution that optimizes cloud service delivery using Parallels Automation, APS ecosystem of services, SmartCloud Aggregator and Smart Cloud for Enterprise.  IBM show-cased the joint solution at Parallels Summit which was followed with great interest from PA partners.  IBM and Parallels will demonstrate the Parallels Automation and SmartCloud Aggregator at Mobile World Congress for existing PA partners who couldn’t make it to Summit and potential telco partners. 

 

The IBM SmartCloud Aggregator enables the service provider to become a broker of cloud-based services that are provided from both inside and outside the service provider’s network. The advantages of this approach include the ability to accelerate operations integration with third-parties’ services, predict integration costs and intervals, and respond quickly to market demand for leading applications. The combination of IBM’s SmartCloud Aggregator with the Parallels Automation storefront provides the service provider with an end-to-end solution that simplifies selling cloud-based services and expands their portfolio with selected services from the Parallels and IBM ecosystems. 

 

You can see the full line up of IBM demonstrations at IBM’s MWC microsite.  Be sure to drop by the IBM booth (Booth 3.B86 in Hall 3) at Mobile World Congress February 25^th through 28^th to learn more how you can participate in this solution.   For more information, please visit: www.parallels.com/ibm or email at mwc@parallels.com