This post was originally published on theWHIR on February 21st 2012 http://www.thewhir.com/blog/parallels-summit-2012-the-app-economy-comes-to-web-hosting

The Yottaa team has just returned from the Parallels Cloud Summit 2012. Parallels is one of the leading platforms that web hosting providers build their businesses on.  Whether it’s a small hoster with a single server running Parallels Plesk Panel, or it’s a large provider with thousands of servers and millions of active websites running Parallels Automation, Parallels’ has a tremendous ecosystem.

Backstory

At the summit I experienced a new level of excitement in an industry that I’ve been a part of for more than a decade.

I have been incredibly fortunate to have led marketing and product efforts at some of the biggest hosting providers in the world.  At each provider I was part of a team that truly “got it.”  So as I listened to presenters from Parallels, Tucows, SoftLayer, Gartner and beyond convey succinctly what we all know: hosting was cloud before the word cloud existed, and the industry has always been focused on the cross-sell and upsell.

Back in the 1990’s the second largest hosting provider in the world was ValueWeb (now Hostway), co-founded by John Enright (now at HostMySite). I was lucky to start my career in the Web hosting industry working for John.  We were pioneers.  We were the first hosting company that had a fully integrated and automated provisioning for an E-Commerce account.  New customers could signup online – and we automatically provisioned their domains, website space, DNS, FTP accounts, email accounts, databases, Miva Merchant shopping cart software, SSL certificates, and merchant accounts.  Customers could be online and selling their products within minutes.  We never stopped adding complementary services like Constant Contact email marketing services, blogging software, website templates, photo gallery software – even online marketing and web design professional services.

At scale these services created a passionate customer base that was successful on the Web.  With high ARPUs (average revenue per user), low churn, and customer service excellence, the Affinity brands of ValueWeb and Gate.com, were leading the industry. With our comprehensive integrated suite of applications, hundreds of thousands of businesses built successful, revenue-generating web presences.

Now every host can win in the “App Economy”

Apps and add-on services have always been the keystone of the industry.  At every hosting conference I’ve been to, analysts from 451 Research, Gartner, Microsoft and others have pleaded with hosts to expand their offerings.  For years these pleas fell on deaf ears.  Most hosts continued to focus on “power, ping, and pipe.”  Millions of dollars of add-on revenue was left on the table as SMBs acquired these applications and services through other channels.

Sure, back then the world was not ready for apps and marketplaces, until Apple launched the iTunes app store alongside the iPhone.  Sure, this was also before the transition from desktop and client-server software to SaaS.  This was also before the growth in APIs, SOA and mashups opened the door for frictionless innovation in apps and their distribution.

But now that market infrastructure is in place, it’s time for hosters to take what ValueWeb did back in the 1990’s and extend it to millions of hosting customers around the world. Parallels APS (application packaging standard) has for the first time truly made that easy and lucrative.  This is exactly what we needed in hosting today, and a fresh team at Parallels is enabling it.

Now the fun starts.  It’s time for hosters to package up, bundle and cross-sell services like backup, SEO, social media services, website acceleration and CDN services, hosted PBX,  mobile enablement, hosted desktops and more.  As telcos enter the space, MSPs expand their offerings, and SMBs move from traditional on-premise solutions, hosting providers and their resellers only stand to grow their revenues and deepen their customer relationships.

The team here at Yottaa is extremely excited to be a part of the hosting industry and the Parallels ecosystem. 2012 will be a year of growth for hosters in the Parallels ecosystem and we’ll all see greater revenues and deeper customer relationships.

Oh, and we can’t wait for many of you to come to our home town, Boston,  in July for HostingCon 2012.  You are all going to get to meet some of the great startups, ISVs and infrastructure companies from the Boston area.