Category Archives: APAC-Partners

APAC-Partners, Parallels Automation

When Change is Constant

 

The business of web hosting can be a rollercoaster ride sometimes. There’s always a new patch, an upgrade, or new technology and products. Things move so quickly that customers are often left bewildered by the rate of change.

 

There has been a growing demand for web hosting services as a result of customers’ shrinking budgets, growing operational costs and the speed at which market opportunities are developing. When deciding on a hosting service, customers often focus on the speed of service delivery, the ability to localize and local data sovereignty.

 

Through our use of Parallels Automation, ReadySpace has put together different service packages that add value to our clients’ operations and meet their specific needs. Our white label offering allows our clients to leverage our platform to quickly brand and start selling to their customers without heavy infrastructural investment.

 

We can’t predict what the world will be like five years from now, but we can be certain change will be a constant. In the near future, we believe more and more applications will converge. This will result in more regulation and the need for localization. All these will change the landscape.

 

But by partnering with Parallels, we are ready for change. By offering a brand of hosting that is as efficient and practical as it is flexible and cutting edge, we believe we can continue to meet the needs of our customers, as we face the changes of the future together.

 

David Loke

CEO and Co-Founder

ReadySpace

http://www.readyspace.com.sg/

 

APAC-Partners, Guest Blog

Leveraging Support as Your Competitive Cloud Edge

 

Cloud and hosted service providers using Parallels Automation have an unmatched capability to combine and integrate applications and services from different vendors to provide their customers with bundles that meet a wide range of business needs. 

 

However, support issues can be a challenge when customers require assistance for services that may not be directly hosted by a service provider. To help Parallels Automation customers meet this challenge, Datacom has been working with Parallels to deliver an integrated cloud support model, which provides customers with access to seamless, end-to-end support for their cloud subscriptions.

 

The Parallels and Datacom support team alliance helps cloud service providers with:

 

•  Activation assistance: Proactively contacting new customers and extending an offer to assist them in setting up their new services, migrating existing data into the cloud and customising applications to the extent possible to support their needs

•  Integration: Providing technical consulting and support to integrate cloud services with the customer’s existing on-premise systems, to enable single sign-on, data sharing and more

• Technical assistance: Helping customers resolve issues when things go wrong, including when the problem is found to be in the service orchestration layer

• Customer service: Answering billing questions, assisting with account changes to add or modify services

• Service growth: Monitoring service usage, bringing new services into the cloud through Datacom’s APS development team, upselling and cross-selling where appropriate

 

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, the support delivered by Parallels and Datacom can serve as a competitive edge for cloud and hosted service providers.

 

Clark Hobson, Vice President

Datacom Group

www.datacom.com.au

 

APAC-Partners, APS, APS Partners, Cloud Services, Parallels APAC Summit, Parallels Automation, Parallels Cloud Services

Powering Cloud Automation Through Partnerships

 

When SoftLayer began back in 2005, the term “cloud computing” was rarely used if at all. The founders of SoftLayer had an ambitious vision and plan to build a service platform that could easily automate, scale and meet the demands of the most sophisticated IT users. They were obviously onto something. Since then, we’ve emerged as the world’s largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, helping the next generation of web savvy entrepreneurs realize their dreams. But we didn’t do it alone. We had partnerships in place—including working with Parallels.

 

Today, the industry is trying to scramble and figure out how this “new” IT shift will work out. Our partners at Parallels had a similar ambitious undertaking—trying to automate and enable a complete gamut of hosting and cloud services. This created a framework for our partnership. We worked with their engineering and sales teams, starting back in 2005, which resulted in Parallels Plesk Panel being offered as an option on every SoftLayer server. That was just the beginning. We are now deployingParallels Automation for hosting partners, and have plans to integrate with the Application Packaging Standard for delivering the broadest array of cloud and hosted applications.  Plans to integrate with other products like the forthcoming Parallels Cloud Server 6.0 (now in beta for trials) are also on the horizon. It all comes down to helping hosting companies and other joint customers thrive and succeed.

 

To find out more about our partnership with Parallels and how it can help streamline your entry into cloud computing, click here. We were also the only “Diamond” sponsor at the recent Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore this year, and look forward to Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas early next year.  We share a heritage and understanding with Parallels borne from a need to simplify and solve IT problems on a broad scale. Now that’s what I call a like-minded partnership.

 

George Karidis

Chief Strategy Office

Softlayer

 

APAC-Partners, Guest Blog, Parallels APAC Summit

LuxCloud Accelerates Resellers Business in the Cloud

 

This post is part of the Parallels Partner Series, featuring the insights of service providers who are growing by leveraging Parallels software, expertise and ecosystem to meet the cloud computing needs of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). View other posts here.

 

In 2010, LuxCloud saw the opportunity to create a platform to help IT resellers market cloud-based applications on a white-label basis. We knew two things would make this concept compelling to resellers: very low start-up costs – as a result of zero infrastructure investment – and the ability to sell services under one’s own brand. And this was how LuxCloud was born.

 

We were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to offer a platform which allowed resellers to focus on launching new services and thus growing their business.  Addressing issues of incorporating automated business functions (like billing) was important to us, as was the ability to quickly and easily automate the provisioning of services.  In addition, the platform needed to be able to scale as quickly as our reseller partners were able to grow their own businesses.

 

We found our solution in Parallels Automation, which provides a complete and customizable operational and business support system for delivering SaaS. Every aspect of the solution – from service delivery through management and billing – is automated. This enables us and our resellers to rapidly deploy new services while minimizing operational costs and maximizing revenues and profitability.

 

The scalability aspect of Parallels Automation is another draw. As resellers get comfortable with the business model, they can add new services quickly and easily. They can potentially scale up from a few hundred users to even a million from the same platform and without investing in any infrastructure.

 

After receiving training from Parallels, we set up an on-boarding process for our resellers, which enable us to get them up and running within a few days.  For the reseller, this faster time-to-market means better return-on-investment.

 

Within weeks of our launch, we won ten reseller partners across Western Europe, earning very positive feedback for our new delivery platform. What also makes LuxCloud popular among resellers is the ease of use and speed of integration and deployment. And because we take care of all service maintenance and management using Parallels Automation, resellers can focus on their core business – selling and delivering cloud services to their customers.

 

We are making plans to expand our business and services offerings using the Parallels Automation platform to include Microsoft Windows-based shared hosting and other Microsoft hosted applications.  We are also planning to expand the business globally, adding additional services and applications according to market needs and demands.

 

We are using our ‘first-mover advantage’ based on Parallels Automation to create a market niche. While other service providers may recognize the opportunity, our deep understanding of the motivations of resellers, our long-standing relationships with the stakeholders in our ecosystem, and the proven success of our white-label distribution platform, puts us in a leadership position in a burgeoning cloud services distribution market.

 

Marco Houwen

CEO and Founder

LuxCloud

www.luxcloud.com