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Two strong themes have emerged at the Parallels Inc Summit in Miami that should grab the attention of Cloudservice hosting companies of all shapes and sizes.

The first is that small businesses now represent a huge opportunity for the Cloudservices and hosting communities. According to Parallels Chairman and CEO, Serguei Beloussov, this market is expected to be worth some $19bn by 2013. As a consequence he has set in train the complete realignment of the company’s approach to the market so that it adopts a Cloudservices-oriented company structure, with services directly helping hosting services companies meet the market demand.

The second, complementary theme is that `community’ in all its forms is good and that partnerships of all types are the best way for hosting businesses to gain the flexibility they need to meet diverse market requirements. This is partly the case because `small business’ has generated so many different definitions.

“Small business is a confusing and misunderstood term,” Beloussov said. “Everyone can understand what `consumer’ means, for that is all of us. `Big enterprise’ is also easy to define. But the analysts, IDC, says there are 73.5m registered small businesses in the world and an estimated 100m unregistered small or home offices. But they spend real money.”

They may have money to spend but by and large they have little or no expertise in IT. Many of them do not have any dedicated IT staff, so the Cloudis a natural option for them in getting the IT resources they require. This does mean, however, that the service providers have to be ready to work with them and offer them the services they require. For Beloussov that means they have to be ready to innovate and optimise their services to meet their needs.

“Is a hotel just a room with a bed?” he asked by way of analogy. “In fact it offers a large number of services, and the more there are the more likely it is that customers will come back. That is what makes a service sticky. This is what service providers need to be offering.”

He suggested that the giants of hosting, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, were still at the stage of offering users `a room with a bed’ and that it would be around three years before they were able to offer a `hotel’.

Service providers therefore need to keepworking at innovating new services as well as optimising the services they have to meet the needs of small businesses. They should also, he said, be paranoid about costs, because this also helps improve the customer experience.

Small businesses may not seem a good source of revenue but, as he pointed out, they offer good growth potential so the service providers need to be ready to up-sell and cross-sell services to them as they growth. “If the right tools exist – Parallels’ Automation for Exchange for example - it creates an environment where up-selling and cross-selling is possible and easy,” he said.

The company’s strategy to meet this demand is to move away from a technology/product perspective and move to a service-based model which divides the company into four broad categories to address the market – shared services, messaging and collaboration, virtualised infrastructure services, and SaaS and other applications. The current product set has been mapped across this rejigged approach as will all future product and tools  developments. Each of the four categories now has a dedicated VP heading it up.

This model is based on an architecture that is based on Parallels’ Operations Automation offering. On this rides Cloudpackaging and delivery, then business automation. The aim is to provide systems that run at 99.99% reliability as a minimum. It must also be adaptable, and the target is to provide a platform where service providers can bring applications and services to market within 72 hours.

Beloussov acknowledged that no single service provider could expect to offer users everything they need, so stressed that partnerships and alliances with other vendors, particularly ISVs, is now an important part of the mix. To help this along Parallels is now heavily promoting its Application Packaging Standard (APS). This is an open standard that simplifies applications packaging for ISVs.

It allows ISVs to focus on innovation and development  while having a simple method of packaging their products so that they can run on any standard-compliant platform. It also allows standard-compliant packages to be integrated together so that complex services can be constructed by service providers. This is intended to meet the needs of small business customers that just want to run their businesses rather than get into the technical issues. It also allows partners to collaborate for more easily.

Parallels is also introducing a CloudComputing Utility. This is a model that runs on top of Parallels’ Operation Automation system and allows hosters to offer applications and services that can be deployed very quickly and easily, helping to make services sticky.