Seeking to bring order to chaos, Parallels recently launched SmartStart for Office 365 to help resellers, VARs and MSPs provision, implement and manage Office 365 and other services. But more on that in a moment.
Pictured: Todd Carter from Parallels demonstrating his company’s solutions
In meeting with John Zanni, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), he sees the market suffering from a service provider sprawl problem. SMBs are consuming more cloud services, with up to half of those purchases being direct. So you have SMBs having to manage different technologies from different companies with no integration. That’s causing SMBs to focus more on IT than running their business. “We need to get back to the VAR/trusted advisor model” Zanni stated. “Parallels’ mission is to help solve the service provider sprawl problem.”
The SmartStart program is an MSP/VAR/reseller fast track to offer a combination of services to SMBs. “What we’ve done with Parallels automation solves problems by aggregating cloud services and orchestrating services via a single pane of glass.” Zanni shared. “[The] challenge in the past was the billing was owned by Microsoft. Now with the cloud services provider program – you can bundle these into a single motion and automate.”
The provisioning, which is key to this offering, is several fold. Technically, it’s the automatic configuration of applications for the SMB via the Plesk management console. For example, the MX record configuration might be automatic.
Zanni’s bottom line? “Paralells Automation has created the SmartStart specifically designed to sell Office 365 for SMB MSP/VAR/reseller.” I would add that your success is Parallel’s success. It has a revenue share program for its MSP/VAR channel so it’s extremely motivated to make sure you are making money from this activity.
But I wasn’t done yet. I followed up with an in-person visit to Parallels’ Seattle office for a demo of its solution. There I was led though a day-in-the-life of a cloud MSP/VAR creating an offering by provisioning a portfolio of applications and services (including Office 365), constructing the infrastructure and then implementing it for a small business customer. I’ll have future blogs delving deeper into the exact technologies from SmartStart.
A couple of highlights from the demo:
- You can see how one Parallels’ partners, Media Temple, makes the Parallel’s Plesk management console an option for customers here.
- The Parallels demo site brings it all together and allows you to vision the type of solution you might want to offer your customers as a MSP or VAR.
PS – I look forward to meeting you at the Office 365 Nation conference in late September in Redmond, WA. Learn more at www.o365nation.com.
