Roy Illsley, Peter Hall & Mile Sapien, Principal Analysts, Ovum IT

At the recent Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, more than 1,300 attendees heard how the SMB market is driving new business for service providers and hosting companies alike. With headquarters in Seattle, Parallels is a private company that does not disclose its revenues. It has 900 employees worldwide and two-thirds of its business is focused on software solutions (including automation) that enable service providers to rapidly bring to market cloud-based services for the SMB market.

The remaining third of its business is a Mac consumer desktop virtualization business where it holds over 80% of US market share. At the event, Parallels made three new solutions announcements, the most significant of which was a cloud storage solution.

The SMB market is driving growth for the channel and attracting new major service providers

Parallels estimates the total global SMB IT …