Thoughts from Parallels Summit 2011

I'm here in Orlando at the Gaylord Palms Resort attending Parallels' Summit 2011.

While walking around the expo at the Summit, I had an opportunity to speak with a number of executives of Parallels partners and customers. The following bullets sum up what I heard.

• Operating system virtualization and partitioning, Parallels calls this "Containers," is significantly more efficient than using virtual machine technology if the same operating system is being used by many different tasks. Only one copy of the operating system is in use even though many different workloads are being supported.
• Small to medium businesses just want to get their IT work done. Quite a few of them don't really want to carry the burden of having an extensive IT department. Parallels tools give hosting companies and cloud service providers the tools to offer these companies a workable solution.
• Customers like Parallels support. Although I didn't ask about this topic, every customer or partner mentioned this on their own.
• The Mac users liked Parallels and said that it worked in a way that seemed more natural than VMware's Fusion.

It was good to have a chance to speak with Parallels executive team once again. They all appear to be highly focused on giving partners the tools needed to enable cloud computing products and services.