Parallels Summit 2010 & The Cloud Services Money Train

To kick off the Cloud madness at the Parallels Summit 2010, the popular “Show me the money” clip from Jerry Maguire was shown on the big screen. It set the tone off well to the ‘Profit from the Cloud’ theme in the three day extravaganza held on February 22-24 at Fontainebleau Resort in Miami Beach.

Melanie Posey, IDC Research Director, in her opening keynote, quickly alluded to the fact that large businesses will be able to navigate their own way in the Cloud market but SMBs need to partner with service providers. This, she noted, “is the way to gain access to new capabilities that wouldn’t be accessible to small businesses otherwise.” The key to success then, is to offer services or packages that eliminate the complexity for the end user.

Serguei Beloussov, Parallels CEO, reiterated strongly that Cloud services make sense to SMBs because it's simpler, cheaper, more efficient and provides more flexibility. Most importantly though, he encouraged service providers "to act now or someone else will." While the giants (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) have their stake in the $44 billion Cloud market opportunity, Beloussov believes they are still three years away from offering full-fledged IT services.

So how do service providers stake their own claim in the gold rush? Develop new services. Deliver better bundled services. Improve time to market. In short, create a better customer experience by improving the quality of offerings.

And fully in tune with this theme, Microsoft GM, John Zanni pointed out that customers nowadays are insisting that IT requirements need to be agile without complexity and, of course, they want to do more with less.

So how does an IT provider successfully address this? Basically, these companies must provide services that integrate easily with their existing investments to negate a build-from-scratch proposition, Zanni said.

After all is said and done though, delivering cloud services profitably requires: agile infrastructure, skilled people and partnerships that help you win and grow.

Incidentally Parallels, you had me at profit.