Parallels Summit 2008 Spotlights Virtualization and SaaS

PARALLELS SUMMIT 2008, Washington, D.C., May 21, 2008 – More than 700 business and technical professionals from more than 20 countries gathered here for the 2-day Parallels Summit event to hear notable industry speakers and network with their peers.

Highlights from day two of the Summit included:

• Bill McNee, founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology, talked about "SaaS and the Third Wave," describing how SaaS is entering a new phase characterized by an increased focus on mission-critical business processes, personalized workflow and collaboration.
• Jack Zubarev, president of Parallels' Service Provider Division provided an overview of "Virtualization for Hosting and SaaS" including both hypervisor-based and container-based solutions, and examined which technology is best for key hosted service offerings.
• Ed Harnish, vice president of marketing, Acronis explained how data availability in the multi-vendor, multi-platform environment requires the IT staff to manage multiple virtual environments running on different hardware and software platforms while not exposing these complexities to the end users in "Vendor Agnostic Infrastructure Tools, including Disaster Recovery."
• Breakout sessions were offered in three tracks: Business, Technical and Industry.
• Closing ceremony highlighted by giveaways from Apple, Microsoft and Magellan.
• Evening networking event held at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium.

The Parallels Summit 2008 was held May 19-20 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event featured keynotes and in-depth product, strategy and networking sessions for business and technical professionals interested in learning more about how virtualization and automation software can optimize their use of technology. Sponsors for this year's event included Microsoft, Intel, Acronis, spreed, Open-Xchange, e.pages, Mesh Solutions, SoftLayer and HP.

About Parallels - Optimized Computing
Parallels is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.parallels.com.