Live Blog: Parallels and How Small Business is Moving to the Cloud

Parallels Software is having its annual conference with discussions about the cloud and virtualization.

The big takeaway we see from this event? The small business market is beginning to see significant growth.

We’ll be live blogging this morning to give you a view about the trends that are evolving in the market.

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9 a.m. EST: Darren Pleasance of McKinsey and Company is giving an overview of the cloud computing market. He is now talking aout consolidation and the requirements for the players to win. The takeaway: local players will continue to have a srong play in the market.

9:03 a.m. EST: According to to McKinsey, loyalty matters. It’s a high loyalty business for hosting providers. The best performing small business cloud services providers are reducing churn. A 1% drop in churn can have significant impacts. Customer acquisition costs need to be low.

Advice for hosting providers:

• Make the service risk free (30-day trials)
• Buy new customers through mergers and acquisitions
• Establish partnerships with other players in the cloud. This would include partnerships with VMware, for example.
• Understand the triggers in the customer lifecycle.

9:13 a.m. EST: The key economic levers apply to the large companies, too. These companies must:

• Provide high quality self-serve offerings.
• Build out world-class CRM
• Develop clear compelling value
• Evolve to lower cost, next-generation infrastructures

9:24 a.m. EST: Seguei Beloussov, Chairman n CEO of Parallels is on stage. He is looking at the giants. He believes Amazon Web Services will grow revenues to $1 billion in 2011 and$2.5 billion by 2014 with gross-margins of 50% and more. He says AAWS will compete head-on with platform vendors.

Salesforce.com will begin to pilot channel strategy in international markets.

He says Google will not focus on the small business market in the short term.

Beloussov says Apple is the mobile cloud leader.

Facebook will extend to voce, instant messaging, email and mobile services. It will ben an integrated services provider.

Beloussov says that by 2015, the small business cloud will be the hottest in the market. It;s a $50 billion small business opportunity.

9:33 A.M. EST: Size does not matter for hosting services. Most important is for providers to optimize operations. A 20% increase in efficiency can make for an almost quadrupling in revenues.

Where is the SMB opportunity? It’s a $28.6 billion market with almost $12 billion in infrastructure services.

9:39 a.m. EST: Voice and Web presence will be growth drivers for hosting to small business provider.

9:41 a.m EST: Parallels will offer services for sophisticated voice solutions. Parallels is making a big commitment to Microsoft Hyper-V.

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