Parallels is a company that has long been a provider of tools for partners to enable end users – hosting tools like Plesk, tools to enable services brokerages and the like. But they’ve been somewhat lacking with a consistent story for the face of modern IT, diverse and heterogeneous infrastructures. That is changing today with an announcement out of Parallels global summit (disclosure – Parallels covered my T&E to attend the event). Parallels is signing up to both integrate and resell the Flexiant cloud orchestration product.

While Parallels previously had its own vertical stack, that was proprietary With this deal they are able to support a wide variety of hypervisors thanks to Flexiants existing support.

But this is more than a simple integration, Parallels is actually going to sell Flexiant’s product through its existing sales channel, and I’m led to believe that parallels sales staffers will be compensated on an equal basis for selling either Flexiant products or Parallels ones.

The integration has been created through parallels automation standard, APS. What this means is that Parallels will be able to offer fully automated provisioning of cloud services, both compute and storage. In turn, by integrating in to Parallels, Flexiant now supports high density, cost effective containers virtualization and cloud storage provided by Parallels Cloud Server.

The integrated Parallels and Flexiant solution is designed to give hosting companies, service providers and telcos the ability to design and launch IaaS and other related cloud services  – between the two products they cover automation, customer management, billing and the full lifecycle of the business process around infrastructure.

This is a real coup for Flexiant – Parallels has a global sales footprint and over 10000 service provider partners – this is a real increase in Flexiant’s market reach and, it appears to me, could indicate an even deeper relationship is potentially on the cards. I wonder if parallels CEO Birger Steen has his checkbook ready.

 

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.