Parallels Summit 2010: Time For Cloud Computing

Over 1100 international industry leaders attended Parallels Summit 2010, a premium event which took place in Miami. The discussions were focused on how cloud service providers can innovate, optimize and grow in order to profit from the cloud.

In his address Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov advised the attendees to identify the huge opportunity presented by the small business need for Cloud services, a market which he predicted will grow to nearly $19 billion by 2013.

“Considerable growth is predicted in Cloud services for small businesses as they provide a low cost, easy solution for these organizations, who need an increasing range of IT services, but have very little IT knowledge and limited budgets,” said Beloussov. “The complexity of IT requirements can easily become an expensive and time-consuming distraction from the core business. Buying services through the Cloud removes both the significant initial expense of buying in-house IT operations, and simplifies decision-making as small businesses can get a range of business IT services from a single provider at a low cost."

The fact is that the cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular. A recent Goldman Sachs study showed that 60% of small and medium enterprises always consider cloud computing/software as a service (SaaS) when searching for purchasing applications. On the other hand, 40% of all I.T spending is already contributable to small businesses, which makes this market a desirable target.

Aiming to be a VMware of SMBs, Parallels is to become the leader in software that web hosting companies will use to provide cloud computing services to small businesses. However, a question that remains unanswered is whether small businesses will buy cloud computing software from hosting companies, or they will prefer the software offered by giants like Microsoft and Google.