Parallels Day 1: Press Rooms and the Cloud

The Press Room made my cry. It was the single most beautiful thing I have seen in my 10 years of covering the Web host industry. Coffee, snacks, water, power sockets in the long table, coffee, comfy chairs, coffee, and did I mention comfy chairs? Journalist heaven, but I digress.

After a healthy breakfast (which sadly, did not include self-service coffee, but that’s probably a good thing) everyone went to the main room for a whirlwind three speaker set: John Eng, Serguei Beloussou, and Morris Miller. This set started off with video testimonials, a trend popularized by FastServers some two years ago. My hat is off to the folks at FastServers.

The Summit boasts some healthy statistics:

• 1000 + attendees
• 100+ ISVs
• 50 sessions
• And Serguei backed by a laser light show!

These stats are nice, but lets put them into perspective. Last year there were 500+ attendees, 20+ ISVs, less sessions, and more important, no laser light show.

The word on everyone’s lips for this Summit is Cloud Hosting and what it means to the future of Web Hosting. I think Serguei said it best when he said, “The problem with the cloud is that it is… cloudy.”

Which sadly, is very true. Many definitions of cloud hosting has been floating around for years. What is interesting is the concept of cloud hosting has been around since the first electronic computers. Back then it was a local concept, mainframe and terminals connecting to the mainframe. Single computer attached to a lot of local computers. With the Internet we are going back to this primitive setup, because well it works. Only now we have many computers interconnected with smart terminals (our computers and Internet ready devices). The Internet has grown to the point of being able to handle the traffic involved with this mass scale setup and the future for it looks bright indeed. Cloud hosting is not just about hosting sites, it’s about promoting services, increasing stability, and reducing overhead costs based on need not on some theoretical amount of resources that a user may or may not need.

However, while the debate continues as to how or what Cloud Hosting is let me leave you with a few statistics from Parallels.

• In 2008, Cloud Hosting expenditures took up 4% of IT budgets around the world.
• In 2010, it is estimated that this will grow to 9% of all IT budgets.
• This is a 26 billion dollar increase.

The question remains, will you make the move or will you stand still?