Category Archives: Guest Bloggers

Guest Bloggers, Mobile Websites, Smartphone, UNITY Mobile

Roll With the Times and Grow Your Business

If you are in your 40’s you were born into a world which is now long gone. Your first date was set up via a landline phone – maybe even a rotary dial! The first music you listened to was from a tape cassette or a vinyl record; flying was not like taking a bus; e-mails were unknown and… well, you get the picture.

Then along came mobile telephony and the internet and they changed the world forever. Today our lifestyle, information and hobbies, as well as work, can be found in one single device which is permanently connected to the internet – and of course it is also in our pocket most of the time.

CirrusOne, Guest Bloggers, Parallels Business Automation Standard, Parallels Plesk Automation, Partners & Customers

Partner to Partner: The Value of Integrating Parallels Plesk Automation and Parallels Business Automation Standard

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.

 

 

Asigra, Guest Bloggers, IT, Recovery-based Pricing

Rationalize Your IT Budget with Recovery-Based Pricing

 

By Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President, Asigra

If you make software purchasing decisions or influence your company’s data and recovery solutions, there are some recent studies you should know about.

The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently surveyed economic buyers, technical buyers, and financial buyers about their data-growth expectations, cost pressures, pricing preferences, and recovery rates. They discovered:

  • – 3 out of 4 respondents expect data to grow at a rate of around 20% a year.
  • – 2 out of 3 respondents felt “some” or “strong” pressure” to reduce IT spend.
  • – Financial buyers were the most likely group to expect a “substantial increase” in backup & recovery costs over the next 5 yrs.

With these data points in mind, let’s now look at another report by Forrester Research: Demand Pricing That Matches Business Value—The Radical Sourcing Trend for 2013. In this report, Duncan Jones explains why the traditional pricing models currently dominating the software market are “obsolete” and “no longer match products’ cost to the business value they deliver.”

 

Jones notes that technology market shifts such as cloud and big data affect the way that IT managers and other purchasers buy software. He goes on to recommend that software buyers demand new pricing models that better match business value.

 

Performance-based pricing models continue to surface in the IT industry, such as recovery-based pricing for backup and recovery users: Recovery-based pricing can be categorized as a performance- or behaviorally driven pricing model that puts greater cost controls in the hands of the user. That’s because this approach has been decoupled from the number of machines protected or the capacity of data to protect. Instead, pricing is connected with the volume of data actually recovered.

 

Recovery-based pricing allows users to pay for what they are purchasing the solution to do – recover their data. It also helps software purchasers rationalize their IT budget for data and recovery because they will be billed for data that is recovered. This model aligns with a recovery metric, no longer solely based on the backup of data. If a company’s recovery needs are less, then users will pay less for these services. What’s more, it offers a fixed cost of backup with a variable cost for recovery based on the amount of data recovered on an annual basis.  

Eran Farajun is the executive vice president for Asigra. The company can be reached at partners@asigra.com or 416-736-8111.

101domain.com, Control Panels, Guest Bloggers, Parallels Plesk Automation, PParallels Plesk Panel

101domain.com – One of First Registrars to Launch Scaled Implementation of Server Nodes Using Parallels Plesk Automation

 

Q&A with Joe Alagna, VP of Channel Development at 101domain.com

 

101domain.com was one of the first registrars to launch a scaled implementation of server nodes using Parallels Plesk Automation. The platform allows web hosting providers to manage tasks asynchronously, including provisioning and infrastructure updates, adding hosting accounts, and managing multiple servers from a single access point. It is also designed to be more secure and to limit vulnerability to attack by isolating production workloads.

 

The project was managed by 101domain.com’s Hosting Services Manager, Rodolfo Elias. We wanted to learn about his experience and tracked him down for some Q & A.

 

Q. Now that you’ve had a chance to work with Parallels Plesk Automation what are your overall impressions?

A. The product gives us the ability to separate services, making it a lot more efficient for us to balance accounts and provision servers as necessary. The centralized management of accounts and resellers allows us to track usage more efficiently.

 

Q. As an early adopter, what advice would you give someone getting started on Parallels Plesk Automation to help them do it better?

A. We took advantage of every one of the features the product offers. Our integration was a bit complex. I’d suggest that they acquaint themselves with the documentation ahead of time so they can understand better how to provision and manage the software within the platform. Use the resources that Parallels Plesk Panel provides and work closely with their team. They’ve been very supportive to us.

 

Q. What are some of the benefits that the platform offers to clients?

A. The client interface is exactly the same as our previous Parallels Plesk Panel interface (Parallels Plesk Panel 11). This was a big advantage because those clients didn’t see any difference at all. We also consolidated all of our clients who used previous versions of Parallels Plesk Panel (versions 8 – 10) so now our entire customer base is on a single platform as we move forward. Future upgrades will be much easier because everything is centralized.

 

Q. But what about other clients? Will they see any other benefits to this?

A. Surely. With the separation of services, there will be less of a load on each server. Their websites will respond quicker. That’s the biggest benefit. The platform is more secure because one service doesn’t affect another. Apache, email, MySQL and web services are all independent. We can monitor the servers better and separate the impact of each service on a server. That makes our client’s websites and email hosting more reliable.

Now our clients can host all of their domains without worrying about overages. They get centralized management of all domains in one place. They also get unlimited email boxes at a very low price. We’re really proud our revamped hosting services platform and we think it’s a great value for our clients.

 

Q. What about resellers? Are there any important benefits for them?

A. Yes, a lot. Our new hosting reseller program will allow us to provide resellers with a branded solution for their hosting ventures. We’re still working on that piece but it will be coming out soon. It’s going to be really nice.