Parallels partners hit a million SMB seats

That significant number of one million `anything’ has been reached, cumulatively, by the partner community of hosting and cloud services enablement provider, Parallels.

The `anything’ in question is a total of one million installed seats across Microsoft Exchange and Office 365. The growth of business class e-mail seats was particularly high, increasing at a rate of 72 percent year-over-year from December 2012. Most of this came from growing demand amongst small to medium businesses (SMBs), which Parallels sees as a demand for a comprehensive portfolio of cloud solutions to help increase IT efficiency.

“Without it, we wouldn’t be where we are today—and we wouldn’t be able to offer our resellers the Microsoft-based Unified Communications services they need to be successful.”

Parallels has been collaborating with Microsoft since 2007 to help telecoms companies, domain hosting providers, distributors, managed service providers and VARs deliver Microsoft-based cloud services for SMBs. By surpassing one million installed seats across the Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 platforms, Parallels has established its position as one of Microsoft’s top cloud management partners, and an industry leader helping hosters and service providers move in on the market for scalable enterprise-grade services amongst the huge SMB marketplace.

The companyhas seen increased adoption of enterprise-class cloud solutions as companies accelerate the shift to the cloud as the best option to support critical operations.

“We pride ourselves in providing a service delivery platform that makes it easy to sell, provision and manage syndicated or locally hosted cloud services,” said Birger Steen, chief executive officer, Parallels. “The above-market growth numbers reflect our deep experience in working with Microsoft. We continue to innovate to ensure service providers have on time access to the latest and greatest from Microsoft and all subsequent updates are transparent to the service provider.”

While Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange are popular services among SMBs, Parallels’ position is that it fully understands its partners’ need to provide a wide variety of solutions. This then helps them build custom-made packages that address the wide-ranging needs of SMBs.

To help address this demand in variety, Parallels is constantly updating its platform to support solutions that are being requested from SMBs. Recent Microsoft additions to the roster include support for Microsoft’s Windows Azure Pack, Lync Hosting Pack, as well as Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft CRM.