Parallels' Summit 2009 Serguei Beloussov Keynote

Parallels is presenting its Parallels Summit 2009 here in Las Vegas. I'll be posting from the show through out the day as I learn what they're doing.

7 AM Update

I'm looking over the agenda and see an interesting array of speakers and sessions. Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and CEO of Parallels;  Morris Miller, Founder of Rackspace and Sequel Ventures, LLC; Bernie Meyerson, IBM's Chief Technologist, Systems and Technology Group and Dylan Larson, Intel's Director of Platform Technology Initiatives are all scheduled to speak.  The afternoon sessions appear to be focused on service providers, IT professionals, IT suppliers and sessions focused on technology.

As one would expect, virtual machine technology, operating system virtualization/partitioning, cloud computing and making best use of industry standard systems based upon multicore processors are highlighted everywhere.

10 AM - Main session update

I found a good seat at the back of the room and am waiting to hear what Parallels and its partners have to say. The customers and partners I spoke with at breakfast seemed all to be highly enthusiastic about Parallels. Some of them represented individual companies. Others represented hosting companies. Still others represented companies who offer products and services that work with one or more of Parallels' products.

Keynote: Serguei Beloussov, Parallels Chairman and CEO

Here are some of the points made by Serguei:

• There are over 1000 people attending this event. 62 countries are representated here.  This is the 4th year the event has presented and the audience has more than doubled since last year.
• What has changed since 2009?
  • Hosting business moving to be considered mainstream
  • The conversation has been changing from hosting to software as a service to cloud computing.
  • Giants, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are grabbing more share.

• What is cloud computing -- just computing that is offered to its users from remote, highly concentrated datacenters
  • Parallels believes that more and more computing will be done this way and is doing its best to help its partners take advantage of this trend
  • Google is doing its best to take advantage of this using its own operating system, APIs and the like.
  • Microsoft has the opportunity to move strongly into this area as well
  • Others want to take part. This is the primary focus of Parallels.

• Clouds how?
  • Compute platform: the example mentioned was Amazon.
  • Application platform: Google app enginer, force.com mentioned
  • Applications: he mentioned salesforce.com and a few others as examples
  • Hosted services: Google, Microsoft, Faceook
  • Note: a strong move towards commoditzing each of these areas. Parallels offers tools to offer all of these services.

• Google
  • Targeting SMBs with SaaS
  • Targeting developers with a proprietary and requires applications to be re-developed using its App Engine

• Microsoft
  • Office Live, Window live and now Azure
  • Platform is late to market and based solely on .NET
  • While a very powerful platform, it is not as widely deployed as other platforms
  • They are trying to juggle packaged software, partner's software and hosted services revenues without minimizing any of these.

• Amazon
  • Claims 330,000 developers, but this is hard to prove
  • It's technology proprietary and complex

• Why the Cloud?
  • Non-hoster - an efficient, low cost way to obtain computing
  • For independent software vendors - a delivery platform that can open up new markets
  • For value added resellers - opportunity to become a service provider as well as selling packaged products
  • For Telcos - opportunity to move up the stack and provide applications as well as just a conduit for messages
  • Seurguei then reviewed why "cloud computing" should be of interest to a a broad group of people. He also pointed out how these should be marketed, sold, operated and, most importantly, why the audience should care.

• Going where the clouds can't go
  • Offering services, office applications and line of business applictions can increase revenues in a number of ways.
  • It changes how partners work with the end customer
  • Offering the broadest set of services and plans results

Serguei thinks and speaks very rapidly making it very difficult to get everything down here. His thoughts on the topics mentioned above were presented in a very persuasive way and were very interesting.