Parallels, the hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced at World Hosting Days Global in Rust, Germany that European service providers are leveraging the company’s cloud delivery software to grow their businesses by launching and managing new services designed specifically to meet the growing needs of small and medium businesses (SMBs). According to Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research for Europe, SMBs remain the fastest-growing segment for cloud services and the optimal target market for service providers of all sizes, with the European SMB market for the cloud services estimated at €9.6B EUR ($12.6B USD) and growing at a 33 percent CAGR to €22.5B EUR ($29.4B USD) by 2015.

To meet the growing demand of cloud services by SMBs, service providers themselves need to be able to grow and scale. To this end, Parallels recently released Parallels Plesk Automation, which is being used by many service providers in Europe, including Myhost.ie, and is deployed on hundreds of servers in the region.

• Parallels Plesk Automation is a scalable, multi-server automation solution enabling a seamless growth path for Parallels Plesk Panel customers to scale to thousands of servers and a wide range of services. Offering a simple, one-click migration path from Parallels Plesk Panel, Parallels Plesk Automation is designed to manage thousands of customers from a central point with a modern design and exceptional usability and will grow with time to include infrastructure and application (SaaS) modules.

“It’s quite impressive to see how quickly we’ve been able to configure and deploy the Parallels Plesk Automation management node, add service nodes, configure service templates, and roll new services out,” said Martin Saunders, Technical Director, Myhost.ie. “Our customers benefit from a single Parallels Plesk Panel to access their distributed web and mail services – now all based on a scalable multi-server hosting environment. This will help us to grow our business, future proofing Myhost.ie to continue to offer a rock-solid and efficient hosting platform.”

Besides becoming more efficient, European service providers will enable customer and revenue growth by simplifying the complexity of getting a professional-looking website and keeping it updated with fresh content. This is particularly true among “micro” SMB customers (firms with fewer than 10 employees), as Parallels research shows 40 percent of these micro SMBs in Europe do not have a website, and 50 percent of these SMBs are considering adopting web hosting in the next three years.

To address this ballooning opportunity for service providers, Parallels has greatly enhanced its website-building solution, Parallels Presence Builder, which has hit the 1,000 service provider adoption milestone. One of these providers is Acens, a subsidiary of Telefonica, as a part of Telefonicas’ Movistar Fusion brand:

• With Parallels Presence Builder, service providers can attract new customers and differentiate their offerings. Parallels Presence Builder has hundreds of industry-specific site designs for SMB businesses, along with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. In addition to integration with Parallels Plesk Panel, Parallels Plesk Automation and Parallels Automation, it now supports cPanel and provides a full set of APIs to integrate with any in-house system.

“Movistar Fusion customers do not usually have deep technical knowledge but many of them need to build a simple personal or business website,” said David Gonzalez, Development Services Manager at Acens. “So it was important for us to be able to include a simple website creation tool in our offering to Telefonica. Parallels Web Presence Builder impressed us in terms of its quality, ease-of-use and price/performance. The range of templates available is also very good, making it ideal for small businesses of all kinds. That’s why we selected it above all the other products we looked at.”

A second area of huge growth and opportunity for European service providers is to offer SMB customers easy-to-consume hosted infrastructure, which includes cloud servers and storage. Across Europe, between 25-50 percent of SMBs indicate they are considering adopting this cloud service in the next three years. This accounts for the projected growth in hosted infrastructure in Europe, which will mushroom from €3B EUR ($3.9B USD) in 2012 to €73B EUR ($9.1B USD) by 2015.

To address this opportunity for service providers, Parallels has launched two integrated products, which have been adopted by more than 50 service providers in the first quarter of 2013, including AXARNet Comunicaciones SL and Host Europe:

• Parallels Cloud Storage drastically reduces the cost of high-availability, high-performance storage. Parallels Cloud Storage uses the existing unused disk space on server nodes to create a self-healing, centralized storage pool for distributed cloud storage. Offered as a seamless upgrade for existing Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and Parallels Server customers, it will support third-party virtualization technologies in 2013.

“We can deploy cloud storage and high availability Virtual Private Servers with the same skills and people we have for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and Parallels Server Bare Metal servers,” said Jesús Pinazo, CEO, AXARnet Comunicaciones SL. “That means we can do everything faster, better and at a lower cost.”

• Parallels Cloud Server now makes it easy to offer all cloud infrastructure services customers want. It includes Parallels Virtuozzo Containers together with Parallels world-class hypervisor technology and Parallels Cloud Storage, combing all of the pieces to enable best-in-class infrastructure services.

“Parallels Cloud Server is aligned very closely to the requirements of Host Europe and its customers,” said Daniel Hagemeier, Head of Cloud Hosting, Host Europe. “It’s a key driver of our success in the cloud hosting business.”

“Our mission is to help service providers profit from the cloud, and we continue to look for the most impactful ways of accomplishing this,” said Jack Zubarev, President of Parallels. “Parallels Plesk Automation is a multi-server solution that easily scales from one server to hundreds and creates a new growth opportunity for ambitious service providers. Parallels Presence Builder makes it easy for service providers to help SMB customers get online with a sophisticated web presence, while Parallels Cloud Server and Parallels Cloud Storage dramatically reduce the cost of providing highly available infrastructure. We are very pleased with our customers’ reception of all these solutions.”

Parallels is showcasing these solutions as a Diamond sponsor of World Hosting Days Global, March 19-21, in Rust, Germany. This is an international event in the hosting community expected to include more than 4,000 attendees and 100 exhibitors.

About Parallels

Parallels is a worldwide leader in hosting and cloud service enablement and desktop virtualization. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with more than 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

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