I’m at the Parallels Summit and just watched CEO Birger Steen discuss the service provider market. Birger spent a few quick minutes discussing what we know – the service provider market is facing consolidation, fragmentation, but also huge growth opportunities. What was particularly interesting though was his talk on the new breed of entrepreneurs. He used Carol, a florist from NOLA as an example of how SMB customers have changed.
Most customers these days start a business and need one, two or three vendors to support their IT needs. Fast forward a few years and now Carol the florist is no longer a florist. She is managing vendor after vendor to ensure she can deliver a service to her customers. And the attributes of these customers have changed. They go to their friends and then take to the Internet to find exactly what services they require. It’s a more informed customer and one that is looking for the best services for the business. Loyalty to a vendor isn’t necessarily part of the equation anymore because services are available from 1000s with only a credit card needed to launch.
So if loyalty alone is not enough, how do you, the service provider ensure you are still part of Carol’s business as it expands and grows? It’s about providing a seamless experience to your users with one UI that allows you to get back to doing your business – for Carol that’s being a florist. The theme of the session is putting the cloud to work for real businesses and that’s exactly what the service provider needs to do – let Carol be a florist!
The SMB market will be a huge area of opportunity for cloud service providers as single proprietor businesses open daily and need IT support so they can focus on their products and services. As these businesses grow, so too will their need for IT and that’s where Parallels sees huge opportunity for its customers.
We are also here today to support cloud service providers as they look to capitalize on the cloud opportunity. Today we announced that Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator now integrates with Parallels Automation. The agreement offers Parallels providers, carriers and multi-system operators (MSOs) easy access to a broader choice of cloud management platforms and virtualization technologies.
How does this help you retain loyalty? Part of this news is that we now allow Parallels to support multi-hypervisors. So if you want Parallels Automation, but have KVM or Hyper-V, we have you covered. Service providers using the integrated solution have a unique advantage to rapidly and cost effectively deliver a variety of IaaS services enabled by Flexiant’s unique cloud orchestration capabilities, all provisioned and managed through Parallels Automation.
