Parallels Summit 2008, Washington D.C.

2008-05-30T18:05:00-04:00

The Parallels Summit garnered over 500 attendees from 20 different countries. This is double last year’s attendance and nearly four times more than 2006’s summit. Along with an increase in attendance, this year’s Parallels Summit also has double the session tracks of last year and 12 more sessions. Session presentations were categorized into three different groups: business, technical, industry.

The Exhibitor Hall contained such conference notables as Comodo, Microsoft, and Layered Technologies. ActualMetrics (a Google business provider) displayed the brand new version of Urchin and Google Analytics and newcomer Sarito Corporation displayed its new offering, HordeSkinsPlus.

The Parallels Summit lasted two days and at the end of each day was capped by an evening event. On the first day, attendees were treated to a scenic voyage on the Potomac aboard the Odyssey. On the second day, attendees watched the Washington Nationals take on the Philadelphia Phillies at Nationals Park Stadium. The boat cruise was sponsored by Microsoft, while the baseball game was sponsored by Intel.

Ravi Pimplaskar, Product Marketing Manager of the Plesk product line at Parallels and organizer of this year’s Parallels Summit, said “The best success in, my opinion, was that the conference improved relationships amongst people in the industry. The networking aspect cannot be underestimated - and the ability for attendees to foster or strengthen relationships with the Parallels’ team, our sponsors, application vendors, the media, and other industry colleagues is what makes the event invaluable.”

The Parallels staff upped the ante this year introducing a Hands-On Lab for attendees. The lab allowed conference goers the opportunity to try out Parallels’ software offerings. Software experts were available to showcase features and give practical demonstrations. “We want to take more of a partner based approached as a company. Our products are feature rich, and as a result there are times where someone may not know that a certain feature exists or perhaps may not know how to use a certain feature effectively. By providing scripts for them, it helps them to learn about these features...,” stated Ravi about the Hands-On Lab.

Other topics discussed includes the need for efficiency, green hosting, improving company focus, consolidation, cloud computing, and the affects of pricing on the hosting dynamic.

Next year’s Parallels Summit will be held in January, although the location has not been finalized, many Parallels employees and attendees a like believe it should be some place warm to break up the cold of winter.

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Microsoft Throws in the Towel

2008-05-05T05:48:00-04:00

Although Microsoft raised their bid to $31 a share (an estimated $44.6 billion in total) there for search engine powerhouse Yahoo, the acquisition was not meant to be. Yahoo claimed the price was still under bidding the value of Yahoo, a point that was only driven further home by the continued stock price gains of the company.

Analysts believed Microsoft preferred an amicable acquisition since trends have shown that key employees leave during a hostile takeover. Microsoft not only wanted the technologies and brand name Yahoo provides, but their employees as well in order to successfully take on the number one search engine provider, Google.

With the possibility of a hostile takeover in sight, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO threw in the towel on the acquisition. In an open letter to the board of Yahoo, Ballmer stated, "Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer." Ballmer goes on to say, "After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees, and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal."

The letter continues on a personal note to Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang. It describes that the recent actions by Yahoo have made the purchase even more undesirable.

“We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a "hostile" bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons….”

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Parallels Summit 2008, Washington D.C.

Microsoft Throws in the Towel