Guest blog by Ehsan Mirdamadi, CEO at Cirrus Tech Ltd.  (http://www.cirrusone.ca/)

Web hosting companies today live in a world where our clients are looking for solutions to their business problems, not just a bunch of raw technology. But providing a broad variety of solutions and tailoring them to each client’s needs creates management inefficiencies, drives up costs, and drives us crazy. If only there were a way to seamlessly automate and manage all these components…

Integrating Parallels Business Automation Standard and Parallels Plesk Automation has been a crucial component in helping us to manage this complexity. Parallels Business Automation Standard automates our billing and business processes, while Parallels Plesk Automation does the same for hosting and related services. We think that Parallels Business Automation Standard and Parallels Plesk Automation are probably the most comprehensive solutions out there, and, while they are effective individually, bringing them together was a vital part of our strategy to enter the era of solutions.

Using these two systems together has enabled us to take control of our services while giving our customers an unparalleled level of flexibility. Our customers are thrilled. We’ve even heard from people who didn’t know this amount of flexibility existed. Suddenly, there’s less of a need for expensive IT consultants, because our solution makes it possible to build a service like CirrusOne, our cloud server offering, independently.

Our CirrusOne scalable cloud platform is powered by Parallels Cloud Server, and uses Parallels Plesk Automation to automate services for customers, which are in turn billed through Parallels Business Automation Standard. We feel that this integrated approach delivers a better experience for customers.

Here are five reasons we like using Parallels Plesk Automation and Parallels Business Automation Standard together, and why we think they’re the right answer for our customers. Using these products together allows us to:

1. Deploy services faster and create natural upgrade paths to new services
2. Easily add services such as MightyCall from Infratel and SmarterMail
3. Establish greater control over a large service range
4. Secure data by separating administration from customer servers
5. Reduce expenditures on server licenses

Before the Parallels Business Automation Standard and Parallels Plesk Automation integration project, many of our customers had to use three different platforms for three different service types. Closing the gap between traditional shared hosting and enterprise class hosting has meant using more services, and spending more time managing them. But now, with the help of Parallels products, we can deploy services fast, and administer them from a convenient place. It’s made our business more flexible, more efficient, and more profitable.