Have Parallels products helped you solve a problem for one of your SMB customers? If so, we’d like to highlight your company and your customer in a case study. Check out some of our existing case studies to get an idea of the type of exposure that your company and your SMB customers will receive, including being highlighted on our website, social media, and at our events like Parallels Summit.
 

Our case studies are professionally written, and Parallels covers all associated costs. All that we ask is that you participate in a short telephone interview with our writer and introduce us to your SMB client that you would like to highlight. You and your customer will receive full review and approval rights, and you will also have the right to utilize the case study for your purposes, however you may choose (your website, eNewsletter, events, etc.)

If you’d like to participate and have us develop a case study for you, contact Scott Fallon, Sr. Director of Partner Marketing.
 

Telenor Norway this week announced that they in partnership with Telenor Group’s Cloud service subsidiary, Telenor Business Internet Services, are teaming up with Microsoft to offer Microsoft Office 365 and Lync bundled with Telenor’s communication services. Parallels made tangible execution among these groups possible.

Parallels partnered closely with Telenor in their Cloud project. Telenor will deploy Parallels Automation, a comprehensive service delivery system, and will work with Parallels broad ecosystem of cloud services providers that are APS certified to build a comprehensive offering. They will use Parallels’ expertise in defining winning go-to-market strategies.

In their announcement this week Telenor Norway communicated that the first order of business for them was to develop a channel outreach and enablement strategy that could be executed in conjunction with launching their first service, syndicated Microsoft Office 365.  Telenor already has an established channel serving over two million subscribers in Norway and Sweden, so it was relatively easy to reach the channel.  The objective though was to find a compelling value proposition that this channel could easily sell.

As it turns out, one of the key differentiators of Telenor’s Office 365 service is that its telephony services are fully integrated into Lync Online from Office 365.  Therefore, it was relatively easy to excite the channel with this highly sought after value-added service.

It became a matter of enabling the channel with proper training to ensure that affiliates could support Office365 effectively for their respective subscribers – and make a decent profit doing so.  Microsoft became a valuable partner in this regard, while Parallels software remains crucial to the provisioning, billing, and self-service enablement of the services.

The next step for Telenor is to expand this program to their subsidiaries across Europe and Asia.  They could make this expansion only with Parallels Automation, as it is the only centralized system that can coordinate across all subsidiaries using Microsoft’s MOSI interface as well as provide comprehensive support for a multi-channel sales motion.  We’ll update this blog post as Telenor evolves their program.

According to Frost & Sullivan’s September 2012 report “Australian Infrastructure as a Service Market (IaaS)”, many organizations see beyond the initial cost savings of cloud-based solutions and are attracted by the promised increased agility and scalability that adoption offers.

However despite the benefits of cloud, many IT departments are still reluctant to move with common barriers including perceived loss of control, data sovereignty and security concerns when they move their workload and infrastructure to cloud. This explains why for those with concerns, hosting of non-critical systems is the common testing ground in the search for the right cloud computing strategy.

Cloud hosting services offers full remote access to the virtual machine (VM) in much the same way as the physical server. Some cloud hosting services also allow on the fly configuration of resources, such as RAM and CPU resources, to match variations in the activity of the website or VM. Just to be clear, this may require a couple of minutes of reboot time of the VM for the new configuration to kick in. Businesses that run business-critical systems like online retailing would do well to bear this in mind.

Many companies that have pre-existing systems they want to move into a cloud based hosting environment wish it were possible to convert their hardware-based server into a virtual machine and host this VM out in the cloud. The hope is to be able to keep all essential fancy configurations and permission settings as the VM gets migrated into the cloud. In reality this doesn’t always happen for a number of reasons, security settings being one of them.  

For businesses using a content management system (CMS) for their websites, migration to cloud-based hosting is relatively simple. Hosting providers have ready-made packages of the most common CMSs and it’s just a matter of choosing from one of these. After importing a backup from the current system, including the database, the SMB will have a copy of the website up and running within hours of the migration. After making a final backup of the old database and restoring it to the new CMS, all that needs to be done is to make changes to the DNS so that the domain now points to the new website. The final step is to put a simple redirect on the old website to catch visitors whose DNS records may be cached and still have the old site settings.

It can sound very technical and complicated. In reality, website administrators and web hosters use a control panel to automate a lot of these processes. In web hosting a control panel is a web-based user interface provided by the hosting company that allows users to manage their various hosted services in a single place.

One such control panel is Parallels Plesk Panel which allows a server administrator to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts, and DNS entries through a web-based interface. The administrator can create client and site templates, which predetermine resource-allocation parameters for the domains and clients.

The recently released Parallels Plesk Panel 11 features 80 improvements that give users more control over their sites. With Parallels Web Presence Builder add-on, Plesk directly addresses SMB needs for social media integration with faster website performance, in dedicated or virtualized environments.

The 2012 Web Server Survey by Netcraft found NGINX to be the third most widely used web server across all domains (11.53% of surveyed sites) and the second most widely used web server for all “active” sites (12.31% of surveyed sites).

With the combination of NGINX and Parallels Plesk Panel 11, users can automatically install and configure an NGINX web proxy in front of a standard Apache web server. This configuration will speed up delivery of clients’ website contents and result in faster and more predictable performance by offloading concurrency and latency processing from Apache to NGINX.

For website owners, whether SMBs and large enterprise, the benefits of fast and predictable performance can translate to higher customer satisfaction and the much sought after stickiness.

Cloud is rapidly becoming the delivery model of choice for many companies. With significant upfront savings and low or zero maintenance costs, the commercial case for any business to adopt cloud is strong. Cloud computing gives every business, particularly SMBs, access to computing resources, including applications and services, previously only available to large enterprises.

With Parallels Plesk control panel the administration of any website has never been easier, more affordable and manageable. At the end of the day, this is what all business owners want of their website. 

Anthony Banek
CEO for OzHosting.com