T-Error

Stunning. Just one week after SWSoft announced the acquisition of Positive Software and its H-Sphere control panel software (2 million end-users), they now announced the acquisition of SaaS provider Sphera.com (customers: AT&T, Japan Telecom, Telecom Italia…) and its hosting control panel…

Sphera provides automation, provisioning, virtualization and management software for hosting companies, telecoms and enterprises.

“We’re building a broader solution set and customer base as a technology provider — using a standards-based approach — to enable the delivery of SaaS by application developers and service providers,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. “Through our three recent acquisitions, we estimate that we will be able to reach nearly 1.5 million additional business customers through our ISV and service provider partners.”

Well this is correct, but standards established by them! If you’re into SaaS and/or value added services for hosting companies there are good chances that you will have to meet their standards. We’ll see how this will have an impact on software manufacturers.

From leading position they now definitely moved to a dominant position. Then you can establish standards. Kind of the Microsoft of Hosting and Virtualization.

Where will they stop, and above all when will the European Union intervene?

Official press release acquisition Positive Software (H-Sphere)
Official press release acquisition Sphera

control panel H Sphere Hosting Provisioning SaaS Software Sphera SWsoft virtualization

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And yet another strategic purchase of Yahoo: they acquired leading open source eMail software and groupware provider Zimbra for $ 350 million. Zimbra was financed $ 30 Millionen venture capital through Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital. Through this acquisition Yahoo will expand its presence in universities, businesses and ISP’s.

This is a direct confrontation with Google apps of course. Yahoo! having the higher customer satisfaction (according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index) this is again very good karma for Yahoo!

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang said:

“Zimbra’s tremendous talent and innovative technology will help to extend our core Mail offerings, further strengthening
our strong leadership position in this space. Additionally, Zimbra’s successful relationships with large ISPs are
key as we expand our worldwide partner network and continue to focus on our commitment to being the partner of choice.”

And the big differentiation, the competitive advantage, vs. Google Apps and MS Exchange is that businesses can host their own collaboration softwares like email, contacts, shared calendar and document authoring tools. And it all works in a browser. Businesses are often reluctant to use Google Apps since crucial business data is hosted on Google’s servers. Oh, Zimbra is also offered as a hosted app by the way.

It is also very likely that Zimbra technology will be integrated into Yahoo’s webmailer.

Clever move…

Official press release
Official blog post

eBusiness Exchange Google Google apps groupware SaaS Search engines Software webmail Yahoo Zimbra

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On Wednesday, the leading hosting automation and virtualization software provider SWsoft launched the new version of its sitebuilder software.

Key new features are:

Sitebuilder 4.0 features for service providers include:

• Promotional Footers – Add company name or other promotional material on each customer’s published website.
• SSO Support – Gain full access to all Sitebuilder capabilities with unified credentials through the SWsoft Plesk administration console.
• Backup/Restore – Back up and restore individual sites or an entire Sitebuilder server.
• Custom Design Template Support – Create custom templates tailored for specific markets with the ability to create one template that can be deployed across both Linux/Unix and Windows platforms.

Sitebuilder 4.0 features for end users include:

• File Download Module – Provide downloadable content on a website.
• Google Maps – Add area maps and get directions.
• Multiple Image Uploader for Image Gallery – Upload multiple images to user sites at once in the Image Gallery module.
• One-Click Publishing – Publish a website with one click after building it using new interactive text in the five-step design wizard.

Since I am a little bit familiar with the hosting industry and hosting software I’d like to drop some comments.

The new end user features are not really brand new things or rocket science. Competitors like CM4ALL do already offer this (and in a nicer way).
A backup function is not really a feature, it’s a requirement! They shouldn’t praise that as a feature in a press release

The “promotional footers” and “Custom Design Templates Support” are really nice features and I know that service providers will love that! Good move.

Hosting SaaS sitebuilder Software SWsoft

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Almost every hosting company offers to its customers a range of 1-click applications like Joomla, PHP Nuke, Wiki, Wordpress etc.

Within its Open Fusion framework, SWsoft now tries to set its “Application Packaging Standard” as a standard.

In one sentence, APS defines a ZIP file with a special XML-file containing meta data of the application. Full specifications here.

This is a nifty move from SWsoft

Establishing a standard should strengthen their position within the hosting industry and tie hosting companies closer to SWsoft.

Besides of that, this “pluggable” approach to distributing SaaS applications would surely be a good thing. It would make it easier for hosting companies to offer applications and developers would be able to increase the spread of their software since they could seamlessly integrate into the hosting environment.

At least that’s the plan.

Let’s see if hosting companies, and more specifically control panel providers other than Plesk/SWsoft and software developers, will adopt that standard. 1&1 (USA) did (in cooperation with SWsoft) and 1&1 (D) is supposed to follow in the second half of this year.

This concept is not really new, Fantastico on cPanel has been around for quite some time now.

1&1 Application Packaging Standard APS cPanel Fantastico Hosting HSP ISV Open Fusion Plesk SaaS SWsoft Web Hosting

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