Feb 23, 2010 : The Planet Partners with Parallels

📅 February 23, 2010 - The Planet selects Parallels Small Business Panel as part of a new value-added solutions bundle.

Parallels, a provider of virtualization and automation software, yesterday announced that The Planet, a privately held dedicated hosting company, has selected Parallels Small Business Panel as part of a new value-added solutions bundle. The company states that the announcement comes ahead of the Parallels Summit 2010 to be held in Miami, where a large focus will be on small businesses moving their services to the Cloud. It avers that Parallels Small Business Panel features a control panel designed for small businesses, offering simple wizards and productivity tools for collaboration, file sharing and business management. This makes self-service possible for all employees using the solution, adds the company.

It further states that the largest feature of Parallels Small Business Panel is Parallels Partner Marketplace, which includes six commercial applications, including Norton Internet Security (desktop security by Symantec), Interspire (email marketing & knowledge manager), Pinnacle Cart (shopping cart), MagicSpam (Anti-Spam by LinuxMagic) and Keepit (online backup). Cloud services providers interested in cloud enablement can leverage Parallels Partner Marketplace, to participate in a revenue-sharing model that offers their small business customers the applications they need with minimal effort. The partner marketplace takes care of the ordering, licensing, billing and subscription management aspects.

The company explains that the Planet is offering a bundled solution that includes every customer having the option to select Parallels Small Business Panel for free. Customers also receive 10 gigabytes of the company's Storage Cloud, along with Symantec endpoint protection for anti-virus and firewall protection. While the uptake of each option varies from customer to customer, the selection of Parallels Small Business Panel is a popular option as customers recognize its use in areas including domain management, collaboration and productivity services, integrated billing and open source application management and delivery.

"The vast deployment of Parallels Small Business Panel by The Planet is further endorsement of how Parallels Small Business Panel addresses the unique needs of small businesses by providing essential IT in a box services as they rush to the Cloud for their IT services," Jack Zubarev, President of Worldwide Service Providers at Parallels said.

Todd Mitchell, General Manager for Dedicated Hosting and Global Services for The Planet said, "as soon as the technology was on board The Planet saw an immediate uptake of the new product bundle."

"We wanted to increase our ability to offer value-added capabilities so we could differentiate ourselves, and continue to drive customer acquisitions and ultimately our own profitability," Mitchell said. "Including an automated control panel with every server provides the self-management options that our customers have requested and traditionally reduces support requests."