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On that front, "we're razor focused" on helping cloud providers serve SMEs, the company's president of marketing and alliances Jack Zubarev told iTWire.
But research carried out by the company suggests Australian SMEs are lagging their counterparts in other countries in terms of cloud adoption. Only 15% of Australian SMEs reported using hosted servers, compared with 20% in other developed countries.
"It doesn't make sense for small businesses to buy servers," said Mr Zubarev. Parallels found that Australian SMEs are price sensitive, and so suggests that providers should educate potential customers about the true cost of running in-house servers (which is probably especially relevant to the smallest businesses that have a 'do it yourself' approach to IT and their slightly larger counterparts who use consultants as necessary), and also to keep basic prices low while offering other add-on services such as security and backup at extra cost.
Parallels also sees hosted communication and collaboration (including hosted PABX services) as a potential growth area for Australian cloud providers, providing they keep prices low and understand what potential customers are looking for, and what will trigger a purchase.
The 2012 Parallels SMB Cloud Insights for Australia report is available via www.parallels.com/smbreport .
