Parallels invests in local channel presence

Virtualisation developer Parallels will open a Sydney office and recruit channel account managers to help fill it before the end of the year.

Chief executive Serguei Beloussov told CRN the company wanted to double the percentage of global revenue from Asia Pacific "in the future" from 15 to 30 percent.

Australia and New Zealand accounted for about a quarter of regional revenue, he said, but a local presence would be instrumental to grow that.

"The office will do partner relationships and first level support," Beloussov said.

"We plan to recruit two-to-five people: channel account managers to do business development with our [service provider] partners and sales engineers."

About 75 percent of Parallels' revenue comes from service providers, who use its software as a platform to offer cloud and other hosted services to resellers or customers.

The software acts as a single interface for the service provider, its resellers and customers to manage their hosted environments.

The service provider pays fees for Parallels' software based on the number of active customer subscriptions it has.

Parallels does not provide the software or applications to be offered as a hosted service; rather, it is up to the service provider to make those choices and use Parallels' platform to create the service.

Service providers in Australia included Melbourne IT, Ultra Serve and iiNet.

Beloussov said value-added resellers and systems integrators were also starting to reinvent themselves as service providers offering hosted and cloud-based services.