|
|
But he warned; 'I think many of the big players are overoptimistic that the channel will be replaced by direct sales.' Instead Mr Steen predicted there will be a renaissance for the channel if companies are able to provide online services that bring together a raft of their own and third party services into a single solution under one billing mechanism for small businesses.
Parallels has just sold systems intended to allow that level of control to local service provider UberGlobal Enterprise.
Parallels was founded in Singapore by graduates from the Moscow Institute of Science and has since carved itself a position in the 'niche players' part of the server virtualisation space according to analyst, Gartner. Mr Steen explained that the company's main product set has three elements - a virtualisation platform; control panels to manage virtualised environments; and the automation and billing tools that allow service providers to orchestrate bundles of services from multiple sources for individual users.
Unlike many virtualisation tools which introduce a hypervisor level, Parallels virtualises at the operating system level. According to Mr Steen this means that about 10 times as many users can access the virtualised environment as might otherwise be expected.
However he acknowledged that; 'The price you pay though is that on any server box you can only support one operating system.'
