News Round-Up 4/21/2012: Microsoft Embraces Open Source, Supercomputing by the Hour, OpenStack News and more

There have been some exciting announcements and fascinating news articles recently regarding cloud services and service providers. Every week we will round up the most interesting topics from around the globe and consolidate them into a weekly summary

Amazon and Salesforce ‘Expected to Join G-Cloud 2.0’

Amazon and Salesforce are expected to join the UK government's G-Cloud and start serving civil servants with hosted computing, storage and ERP from May.

Microsoft Dips Further Into Open-Source Software

Microsoft announces it is creating a wholly owned subsidiary for the open source community. Will the open source community embrace their support or will their skepticism keep Microsoft at arms length?

Supercomputing Rented by the Hour

Once only available for governments and huge companies, the power of supercomputing is now available to rent by the hour. Cycle Computing has put together a massive supercomputing cluster that can be used by smaller companies for a fee.

OpenStack Surprises Involve Hyper-V, Solid State

Hostway and MorphLabs have contributed to the OpenStack platform. Coming on the heels of an active week of comings and goings in the OpenStack realm, further developments keep the platform in the news.

Rackspace Takes OpenStack to Production

Rackspace comes out swinging after Citrix publicly divorced from the OpenStack platform. Although there are still some issues to iron out, Rackspace has begun to roll out OpenStack in a measured approach.

‘High Performance’ Emerges in Cloud Offerings

SoftLayer introduced a series of new cloud-based high performance computing to their cloud offerings. Powered by a dual-processor Sandy Bridge server, SoftLayers offering should provide impressive speed and improved performance.

Also in the news:

• Microsoft Open Technologies: Same Old, Same Old?
• What to Consider Before Signing Up for Google Drive
• Cloud Computing in the Real World

Summit 2012: Parallels Road Map Track 2

There was a plethora of great content at Summit 2012 this year, and it was impossible to attend it all.  Fortunately, we have all of our talks on YouTube!  For this series of posts, we have consolidated the talks by tracks at Parallels Summit.

Chart Your Future: Parallels Roadmap - Find out where Parallels innovation is headed for 2012 and beyond.

Parallels Panel Roadmap

Craig Bartholomew, VP, Hosting Control Panels and Shared Hosting, Parallels

Be the first to know what we have planned for the next generation of Parallels Plesk Panel to help your hosting business save money on server costs, reduce labor cost, increase efficiency and sell more servers.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Accelerating mobile adoption: Convincing small businesses they need more than a Facebook page

Roy Joseph, President, UNITY Mobile

This session will address the growing need and challenges for SMBs to have an internet presence beyond the browser. This includes a presence on Facebook as well as the ability to deliver a good customer experience across mobile devices. Come find out how SMBs can easily add these capabilities, and how service providers can profit and differentiate offering these services and solutions.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

The evolution of IT hosting services: What's next?

Lance Crosby, CEO, SoftLayer Technologies

Understanding how cloud, dedicated and managed web hosting services will evolve and change is crucial to staying competitive. As one of the world's largest privately owned hosting companies, SoftLayer will speak to industry leading trends which highlight the need for businesses of all sizes to adopt solutions that offer control, security, scalability, and ease-of-management. The presentation will also discuss how SoftLayer is working with Parallels to deliver the next generation of IaaS solutions.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Differentiate and grow your hosting business with Parallels Business Automation Standard

Alex Goncharov, Sr. Director, PBAS Product Marketing, Parallels

Join a PBAS expert for insider tips on how to accelerate your business. Alex will also provide a view into how we’ll be enhancing the capabilities of PBAS in the coming years.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here.

Opportunities with Google Apps

Jeff Ragusa, SMB Channel Programs Lead, Google

In this session you will learn how to extend your portfolio with Google Apps - Google's business suite of messaging and productivity applications. Bring these powerful web applications to your clients allowing them to work efficiently from anywhere on any device. By leveraging Google's channel program you can deepen and strengthen your customer relationships and grow your cloud services practice without disrupting your existing business.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Compliance: Understanding the legal and regulatory issues

Christian Dawson, COO, ServInt

David Snead, Attorney at Law

Compliance is becoming an even more important issue because governments are increasing the level of regulation related to intellectual property protection, privacy and protecting children. You need to understand the regulatory framework in order to build a secure cloud. This session will present the existing framework of security laws plus pending and anticipated legislation. Attendees will be given a framework to analyze their current compliance with these laws, and insights into whether certain important proposed legislative initiatives are likely to be adopted and what it will mean if they are.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Summit 2012: Practice Best Practices Track 2

There was a plethora of great content at Summit 2012 this year, and it was impossible to attend it all.  Fortunately, we have all of our talks on YouTube!  For this series of posts, we have consolidated the talks by tracks at Parallels Summit. 

Practice Best Practices: This track focused Summit Attendees on how to best use Parallels Products to drive business growth, and efficiently provide the Parallels products to customers.  Additionally, this track emphasised how to best capitalize on the growing SMB cloud market.

Panel: Building a secure cloud for customers – demystified

Alex Danyluk, Sr. Director SaaS & ISV Alliances, Parallels (moderator)

Panelists:

• • Rick Norman, Director of Professional Services, CoalFire
• • Sean Leach, Vice President, Strategy and Technology, Verisign
• • Brett Matesen, Director of Business Development, Kaspersky
• • Dreas van Donselaar, CTO, SpamExperts

The cloud promise is that all data, applications, and services are accessible from any device over the internet, but this has tremendous security implications at every layer from the network to the servers to the systems and end-point devices. Listen to a panel of experts discuss the trends in keeping the cloud secure, what matters to customers, and what security issues need to be top of mind for you in 2012.

Customer Support: Parallels lessons

Kellie Green, VP, Global Support, Parallels

Support can be a key differentiator in a service provider business. Parallels has made major strides in enhancing its Support capabilities in the last year and this session will provide you with our learnings. Pick up new ideas about optimizing your support experience and hear more about the changes planned in Parallels Support this year.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Panel: Best practices for growing a hosting business - being on the right side of the growth curve

Liam Eagle, Editor in Chief, Web Host Industry Review (moderator)

Panelists:

• • Steven Canale, Vice President of Sales, SoftLayer Technologies
• • Joy Nemitz, CMO, Apptix
• • Roy Joseph, President, UNITY Mobile
• • Craig Ball, Director of Sales, Infratel
• • Jon McCarrick, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Parallels Automation, Parallels
• • Igor Seletskiy, Founder and CEO, CloudLinux

While the hosting industry is experiencing double digit year-over-year growth, leaders in this sector are growing much faster than the industry average. This panel of experts will talk about what is working (and not working) and why.

You're thinking mobile, but you might not be thinking big enough

Elliot Noss, President and CEO, Tucows

Thinking about how to capitalize on the remarkable growth of mobile this year? Make sure you are thinking big enough. That might require a shift in how you define yourself, from a product focus to a relationship focus. You will likely find that your relationships are your real advantage and that your customers will buy much bigger products from you than you realize.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Grow your business: Parallels partner resources

Scott Fallon, Sr. Director, Partner Marketing, Parallels

Leverage the resources Parallels offers to support your operational, marketing and sales efforts. We’ll talk about new and enhanced benefits offered through the Parallels Partner Program, technical support resources, working with Parallels Sales and more. And we’ll take your feedback on what partner benefits and tools you’d like to see added in the coming year.

You can download a PDF copy of this presentation here. 

Parallels Plesk Reality vs. Myths

Parallels Plesk Reality vs. Myths

By Craig Bartholomew, Vice President, Shared Hosting, Parallels

Many people claim to know Parallels Plesk, but we regularly see postings about Plesk that indicate enough out-of-date knowledge that some people may want to take a fresh look at Plesk. Our release of Plesk 10.4 is a chance to finally put some myths about Plesk to rest.

I came to Parallels from Microsoft in June 2009 to lead the Plesk team, after 21 years there in product development. I found a very talented team here at Parallels that was beginning to invest more heavily in both enhanced testing as well as improved processes to improve quality. For the past two and a half years, my team and I have stayed focused on customer needs, performance, security and, of course, quality. Plesk 10.4 is the 5^th release in the Plesk 10 line, and is the culmination of a lot of hard work in quality assurance and innovation.

We hope you’ll take a fresh look at Plesk – not simply believing those who profess deep knowledge of Plesk in Forums – but in reality knew only Plesk 8 or 9. We believe that Plesk will give you the best path forward toward the future of Hosting, as we take more and more steps to future-proof you – such as our industry-leading support of IPv6 and SNI. Our 10.4 online demos are up and running now under the Demos tab on http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/demos/. Please check them out.

To help you further along the way of understanding where we’re at on 10.4, I’d like to debunk 20 myths about Plesk. Here are the first five:

Myth #1: Plesk does not give me the control I need. Plesk really annoyed me when it would overwrite the changes I made as an Admin.

Reality: Earlier versions of Plesk were a bit like nannies – overwriting the config changes you tried to make. In Plesk 10.4, you have the control over your environment that you have been demanding. Our innovative Custom PHP Settings gives you intuitive control over versions and settings for PHP per VHost or website (depending on the permissions you set). Advanced users can go beyond the simple drop-down selectors in the UI and configure their own advanced settings. Also in Plesk, Hosters can define custom Apache configuration templates for each VHost, and go to the revised Tools & Settings page in Plesk 10.4 to turn on/off Apache modules.

Myth #2: Plesk is not secure. I’ve even seen that in Wikipedia.

Reality: Well, we can’t speak for Wikipedia (which really needs to be updated on this – any volunteers?), but we have put special focus on fixing every known aspect of Security in Plesk 10.x. Version 10 is easily configured to pass PCI scans. In addition, we randomly generate new Admin passwords (replacing insecure default passwords) and have added a password strength indicator. We have addressed cross-site scripting vulnerabilities – including adding a token to pass any input from forms in the UI. If we encounter security problems (typically in 3^rd party components), we respond quickly with fixes.

Myth #3: Plesk does not provide good Site Isolation for shared hosting.

Reality: Since the outset, Plesk 10 has offered site isolation. Plesk does this using FastCGI to provide industry-leading shared hosting account density per server. So, we not only give good site isolation, but also good economics on the number of shared hosting accounts per server.

Myth #4: Plesk is too expensive. It is more expensive than other Control Panels.

Reality: Plesk used to be more expensive if you tried to run Plesk on non-Parallels virtualized environments. We are fixing that by making the Plesk Unlimited Domain VPS license available on all virtualized environments. Also, the Plesk Unlimited dedicated license is typically at $39.95/month or lower at most of our hosting partners – which is competitive. But, because Plesk offers you integrated Billing and integrated Site Creation, the combined price of the Plesk family is advantageous to you in both price and simplicity. And if you choose to enable Parallels Partner Storefront in your Plesk Panel, you can partner with Parallels to resell high value SaaS applications from leading application vendors – all with a few mouse clicks. We think of “value” more than price – and we think we offer very, very good value.

Myth #5: The included Billing with Plesk is the old ModernBill, which is quite buggy and outdated, so it really isn’t worth much.

Reality: Plesk’s Customer and Business Manager is several generations advanced from ModernBill and now is available on both Linux and Windows. Initial configuration and the entire UI has been streamlined and updated based on usability testing. It supports international currencies, international tax rules, and a reseller tier now. There is very strong active development and dramatically improved QA on this product. The reasonable price means you should definitely take a second look at this.

Check this blog next week (or better yet, subscribe to it) for the next five Myths about Parallels Plesk Panel.

We encourage you to be myth-busters on Plesk. Check out our website at http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/ and spread the word. It’s a new Plesk we are talking about now, and you should check it out.

All the best,

Craig Bartholomew

VP, Shared Hosting