Parallels is pleased to announce several new services in 2013 that will empower service providers to grow their business.

 

•  The Parallels Cloud Acceleration Services from Parallels Business Consulting include will help businesses with service definition, business processes, and go-to-market planning as well as offer leading practices forged from over 200 Parallels Automation deployments.

• The 2013 SMB Cloud Insights research offers a new category of market intelligence around Cloud Strategy.  Using the power of Kano and conjoint analyses we are able provide you not just intelligence around market sizing and opportunities but also your best options for market and product strategy based on that intelligence. And later in 2013 we will further expand the value of our SMB Cloud Insights research by rolling out a new training product that distills the knowledge and insights from the SMB Cloud Insights research into tools you can use to train and certify your own staff.  This will allow you to drive market intelligence to support decision-making at every level of your company.

• To further engage the over 350 new certified hosting partners, as well as those certified partners who have already joined our Partner Program, we’re extending the Partner Program and ParterNet to ISVs with our new Cloud Services Developer Program.  This includes the new Parallels Cloud Service Certification program which both provides more market opportunity to APS ISVs and, through additional levels of training and validation, a better end user experience for APS applications on Parallels products. 

by, Brian Spector, CEO, CertiVox

 

Clearly, the application packaging standard APS has, over the last few years, gained significant traction. Driven by the SMB sector, which has embraced the procurement of enterprise-class computing capability in applications from managed service providers around the world, APS has become a critical element in the go-to-market strategy of hundreds of ISVs and thousands of Managed Service Providers.

 

CertiVox has embraced APS for some of its services, so I know first-hand its advantages – and some of its challenges. It’s fair to say that APS 1.2 didn’t deliver across the board.  But what’s new in APS 2.0?

 

 

Users are king (but who are they?)

Driven by the feedback that users have given, APS 2.0 provides a dramatic increase in functionality over its predecessor in four key areas – user interface, provisioning, single sign-on, and authentication.

 

There isn’t the space here to go through all of these, but let’s take authentication as just one example. At all levels of the cloud “chain,” this is becoming a critical consideration. Recent high-profile “smash and grab” attacks, for example, have used username and password vulnerabilities in websites and enterprise systems to steal user data.

 

These attacks have highlighted that it is simply no longer enough for users to have an identity that the system recognises as being legitimate. Instead, they need to be in a position to prove that it is an identity of which they are the rightful owner? In other words, is a user – every user – really who they say they are?

 

Once it is clear that the user is who they say they are, then it becomes possible for the hosting industry to provide, for the first time, a secure single sign-on experience across all provisioned services – and this is absolutely what users want and need. It enhances usability, improves cross-sell opportunities and reduces churn, so it’s pretty darned important for user and provider alike!

 

 

Authentication – inbuilt!

In APS 2.0, for the first time, a combination of multi-factor and multi-party authentication, as well as strong, end-to-end encryption, can be inbuilt. This authenticates users at all levels. Administrators, for example, can authenticate themselves to configure service options and manage the storefronts and choose applications for their business.

 

Service Providers can also resell the authentication services to their hosting customers, who can use them for all kinds of products and services of their own, to capitalise on the exploding demand for strong authentication across the industry.

 

And it’s simple. Using nothing more complex than a 4-digit PIN, users can sign in securely to all provisioned services to which they are entitled. APS federates the users’ credentials across the relevant services using a highly secure encrypted token.

 

Make no mistake; this is single sign-on, strong security, with reduced vulnerability and increased flexibility and scalability – in one package. And no username and password to forget!

 

APS 2.0 – want to find out more?

If you are at Parallels Summit 2013, come and see our Developer Track on 6^th February at 10:30, and learn about Extending APS packages with Single Sign-On.

I’ll also be looking at some of the other “pillars” of APS 2.0 that I describe above – and explaining more about how they give developers, service providers, ISVs, partners, end-users and others the competitive edge in the cloud.

While enterprise IT is transitioning form on-premise deployment to an emerging architecture of hybrid cloud, IT professionals are facing unprecedented challenges to change from managing servers deployed on premise to managing services in hybrid cloud, at the same time extraordinary opportunities to upgrade and expand an individual’s skill profile and become a leader in cloud initiatives and a contributor in IT communities.
Windows Azure relevant to Microsoft private cloud solutions is, in my view, as critical as what Active Directory means to Windows infrastructure. In a Windows domain, Active Directory holds the one version of truth and is the ultimate authority of all resources defined. Similarly when it comes to Microsoft cloud computing, there is no question that Windows Azure is the de facto platform as an extension of Active Directory in the cloud. While enterprise IT is transitioning form on-premise deployment to an emerging architecture of hybrid cloud, IT professionals are facing unprecedented challenges to change from managing servers deployed on premise to managing services delivered with hybrid cloud, and at the same time extraordinary opportunities to upgrade and expand an individual’s skill profile and become a leader in cloud initiatives and a contributor in IT communities.

read more

Scott Bils has a post on the “Five Mistakes that Enterprise Cloud Service Providers are Making” over on Leverhawk. Points four and five were particularly interesting because it seems there’s a synergistic opportunity there.
Point number four from Scott:
Omitting SaaS and PaaS: Cloud infrastructure service providers have little incentive to migrate customers to public cloud SaaS offerings such as Salesforce.com or Workday. For many customers, migrating legacy apps to SaaS models will be the right answer. Many enterprise cloud service providers conveniently omit this lever from their transformation story and lose customer credibility as a result.

read more

A new sub-market of the broader cloud-computing market has emerged: the cloud service broker, but the market has yet to fully define it.
Emerging markets don’t generally follow smooth, predictable paths. Rather, they struggle and jerk unexpectedly, much like an eaglet escaping from its shell. Vendors, analysts, and pundits may seek to define such markets, but typically fall short. After all, vendors don’t establish markets. Customers do.

Today, cloud computing is still in its birth throes. Yes, many organizations are now achieving value in the cloud, but many more still struggle to understand its true value proposition as cloud service providers (CSPs) and vendors mature their offerings in the space. One problem: cloud computing is not a single market. It is in fact many interrelated markets, as its core service models, infrastructure-, platform-, and software as a service (SaaS), fragment as though they were so many pieces of eggshell.

read more

Unifying identity and access management has been a stretch goal for IT for nearly a decade. At first it was merely the need to have a single, authoritative source of corporate identity such that risks like orphaned or unauthorized accounts could be addressed within the enterprise.
But with a growing number of applications – business applications – being deployed “in the cloud”, it’s practically a foregone conclusion that organizations are going to need similar capabilities for those applications, as well.
It’s not easy, there are myriad reasons why unifying identity and access control is a stretch goal and not something easily addressed by simply deploying a solution. Federation of identity and access control requires integration. It may require modification of applications. It may require architectural changes.

read more

“We are pleased with the responses we are receiving from our service provider partners and will continue making a substantial investment in our expertise and knowledge initiatives,” said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels, on the occasion of the publication of the latest report in the Parallels SMB Cloud Insights series.

Now entering its third year of annual publication, the research results continue to confirm that SMBs remain the fastest growing segment for cloud services and the optimal target market for service providers of all sizes, with the global market for SMB cloud services expanding at a 28 percent CAGR to $95 billion by 2015.

“Parallels SMB Cloud Insights research is core to our commitment to help service providers make both strategic and tactical decisions about the rapidly growing market for SMB cloud services,” Steen said.

read more