Parallels Summit - a conversation with Sergei Beloussov

I had the rare opportunity to speak with Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels, and Parallels Director of Worldwide Communications, Jenny Ellis. I've always been impressed by Sergei's ability to gather facts from a number of sources, integrate them into a clear picture of what's happening and then articulate what he sees in English. This is difficult even when English is the executive's native language. In Sergeui's case, Russian is his native language not English.

His ideas bubble up so rapidly, that I'm just going to present "thought bubbles" in the form of bullets.

• Even though hosting companies purchase new systems at a more rapid rate than large commercial organizations, the market doesn't think hosting is real. Most of the research published by organizations such as Gartner or IDC just present the shipments of systems not where they went.
• A big company may purchase 1,000 systems a year. A medium size hosting company purchases 1,000 systems a month in some cases.
• This cloud computing space is what the internet always promised.
• The move to cloud computing changes major market dymanics.
  • Systems and software are selected based upon what is best for the hosting company.
  • Does an organization really care what operating system, hardware supplier or application is selected?
  • No, they are more interested in the services being offered and the pricing model.

  Personal Experience

  Since the Kusnetzky Group's own systems are "in the clouds," much of what he said made a great deal of sense.

  When KG was selecting platforms for its website, for its collaborative solution and for its database of impact papers and other content created by KG's analysts, many approaches were considered. In the end, purchasing its own servers, software and hiring its own staff was ruled out.  It quickly became clear that this approach was far more cost effective. The biggest challenge was finding a hosting company offering all of the applications and services the company needed.

  Lunar pages was selected as our supplier of computing power. We know of others who are very happy with GoDaddy and 1&1. If an organization looks around a bit, it soon becomes appearant that a broad array of services are available.  Some of the most intriguing were offerings from small, local hosting companies.

  Would your company consider hosting some of its applications in this way?