Parallels: Hosting providers have a chance before SaaS market is monopolized

The virtualization vendor Parallels has released the new version of its application hosting management platform Parallels Automation 5. This solution allows hosters and internet service providers to easily add the application hosting to their services and increase revenues from the existing customer base. Parallels Automation allows to automate all aspects of providing cloud services and applications - managing customer accounts, creating and managing application containers, invoicing, collecting payments, customer support. The new version allows service providers to add services based on MS Exchange Server 2010 and MS Office Communications Server. Besides, Parallels Automation supports MS Sharepoint and MS Dynamics CRM, as well as about 50 web-applications that can be found in the marketplace apsstandard.org.

Parallels Automation supports those web-application, that have a version, packaged with the APS (Application Packaging Standard) standard. In particular, apsstandard.org includes such apps as SugarCRM, Mantis, Wrike, MediaWiki, etc.

Sergey Belousov, Managing Director of Parallels, sais: "Providers must act quickly and learn how to earn on SaaS before the cloud market is monopolized by big vendors". While Microsoft's SaaS solutions (BPOS, MS Dynamics CRM Online) don't provide the full functionality and available only in the U.S. and several other countries, hosting providers have an opportunity to capture a part of SaaS market. If they will be the first to attract companies to the Cloud and gain their trust, even with the appearance of vendor's SaaS services, the companies will have no need to move their IT systems to another provider.