by, Adam Bogobowicz, Senior Director of Marketing, Parallels
Our goal is to make easy-to-use and feature-rich products that are a delight to our customers. That being said, for a well architected, engineered and designed product to make a difference and gain acceptance, it has to do more than delight its end users. For a panel product to be successful, it has to do two more things. First, it needs to enchant hundreds of our partners who recommend and deliver it to the customers as a service on their infrastructure. Second, it needs to make a difference for the community of users who support it, use it, recommended it and help make it better.
With Parallels Plesk Panel 11 we have experienced the fastest adoption rate of any of our panel products ever. With over three times the adoption rate of any previous version, it is supported by a vast majority of infrastructure providers who make it available on physical hardware, and any imaginable virtual environment, from highly efficient container technology to open and commercial hypervisors. This level of adoption is higher than market growth rates or historical product adoption rates.
I attribute the success of Parallels Plesk Panel 11 to three fundamental factors.
- Plesk 11 has reached a new level of usability that makes life for server administrators in small businesses meaningfully better.
- Unprecedented support from a family of Parallels partners who deliver Plesk 11 to customers because the product itself has made major gains in supportability and security.
- A new level of excitement from a community of small hosters, who are not only delighted by the maturity and completeness of the hosting features, but now are also excited by the growth path that Parallels Plesk Panel enables when combined with a multi-server solution delivered by Parallels Plesk Automation.
With Plesk 11, we have reached a new level of visual and functional simplicity that allows administrators of any skill level to effectively execute core business tasks without the need to learn, or get support, from Linux or Windows server administrators. For example, we are able to adjust the level of UI complexity at the product setup time and match it with administrator skill levels. As one of our customers commented, “Everyone who is not a full time IT person should use Plesk. [I’ve] been using it for about 10 years and it gets better with every release. Since I moved from physical servers to AWS, it makes managing your server a breeze.”
This new level of usability translates directly into experiences of service providers delivering Plesk 11 on their infrastructure. It increases customer satisfaction and cuts down on support volume and costs. With Plesk 11, we are experiencing support ticket counts three times lower than with previous product versions. It is no wonder then that when you combine this with easy migration from Panel 10 to Panel 11 and hardened security of Panel 11, we have experienced unprecedented launch support with 80 of Parallels’ top partners becoming Parallels Plesk Panel 11 launch partners actively promoting value of the product to new and existing customers.
Most important, however, is the support this product has received from the community of shared hosters. With the announcement of Parallels Plesk Automation, a multi-server solution based on Panel 11 technology, our most important customers are genuinely excited about new growth opportunities for their businesses. Having once been locked into a single server hosting solution and paying with high administrative overhead for the limitation of the software, hosters love the fact that they can now use Plesk 11 as a platform for a new level of efficiency and growth enabled with Parallels Plesk Automation. And this story will only get more exciting when Plesk Automation is extended with new revenue generating services, like cloud VPSs, syndication and enablement of SaaS services with another exciting technology APS 2.0.
Lessons learned from Panel 11 launch and momentum and feedback from our customers and partners are driving our engineering path forward, and we are fully committed to this winning formula. I could not be more optimistic about the value the next wave of innovation will bring to our customers.
