We’re back from the most recent Parallels Summit APAC in Singapore (our 4th time) and are happy to report, it was the best ever. There was a high-caliber audience on-hand with a ton of interest from the Asia-Pacific region aorund upselling, reselling, bundling and delivering a range of cloud services, especially email and collaboration. And of course, Germany’s own Sebastian Vettel winning the only night-version F1 Grand Prix helped create enormous buzz during the event, on site as well on Twitter.
So it was of no surprise when we learned from Parallel’s Marketing & Operations office of APAC that the attendance of the top 100 target group for the APAC summit, the attendance improved by 250% compared to last year. While some of the regulars among the big accounts (i.e. Microsoft or IBM) were “missing-in-action,” a strong Japanese presence was on display lead by giant NEC; many Taiwanese telcos, a close second.
Open-Xchange’s own Ernst online casino Kelting (VP Sales Asia) spoke at a session about how service providers can profit with SaaS-based email and collaboration implementations and product positioning. During his “How to make money with SaaS” presentation, he spelled out how at our own Summit in Berlin this November (for more follow #OXS12), going-to-market with Open-Xchange
Not only are we gaining traction with pushing boundaries with service provider models, developing markets like APAC are providing open dialogues with hosting and IT service provider companies who are eager to change game and services engagements with their customers. Fortunately for them, at Open-Xchange: we are ruthlessly open℠ about where and how they can benefit and have working examples to prove it.
We also met with Eugenio Ferrante, head of APAC marketing, and David Dzienciol, the new VP APAC at Parallels. We were quite amused that attendees played “Who wants to be a Millionaire,” which wasn”t easy. For the spelling bees, David´s last name gave them quite a challenge! Try it yourself: “D-z-i-e-n-c-i-o-l”! Got it right? (David, we feel for you for every time you have to do that over the phone!)
The event was well worth the time, travel and late night car racing noise as the Open-Xchange team networked with the players in the APAC hosting and telco world there at Marina Bay Street Circuit. The checkered flag was waved after 2 hours of racing, almost as fast as it would take a telco from Singapore to install a working version of Open-Xchange.
See you next year at the Parallels APAC Summit 2013; will see you even earlier in Las Vegas for the Parallels US Summit!
