We’ll help you determine the right services to offer; provide you with critical business thinking and best practices, developed over more than 200 Parallels Automation deployments; and analyze your sales channel, roadmap, and buyer/reseller experience to identify ways to increase your profits and grow your subscriber base. As a result, you’ll:

• Quickly identify ways to profit from the tremendous cloud opportunity that exists among small and medium businesses (SMB) worldwide.
• Accelerate your time to market—and decrease your time to revenue by 30 to 50%. Note: This is based on a typical time of six to nine months for a service provider to develop and launch a new service—and our proven ability to cut that time by three months.
• Grow your average revenue per user.
• Expand your customer base.

To successfully sell cloud services to SMBs, you need an in-depth understanding of your target markets—markets that may differ significantly according to both the size of the businesses you’re targeting and the countries in which they’re located. Parallels Cloud Acceleration Services includes two offerings that will help you more fully understand your target markets.

Cloud Business Strategy
This service applies our extensive experience in the SMB cloud services market to help you develop your channel strategy, business case, and cloud service portfolio. The four-week engagement includes:

• Cloud market assessment: Analysis of the market and key trends, based both on our own Parallels SMB Cloud Insights(tm) 2013 research and on research from leading market analysts. This service concludes with a report, delivered via a web conference.
• Cloud business strategy workshop: A two-day workshop in which we help you define your target market, service portfolio, and channel strategy.
• Business case review: A review of your cloud business case, with recommendations delivered via a web conference.

During 2011 and 2012, Parallels interviewed SMBs of different sizes, industries, and countries about their cloud service consumption, future plans, and attitudes. Based on this research, we’ve created comprehensive views of the SMB market for cloud services in 14 countries, as well as for the global, European regional, and Asia-Pacific regional SMB markets. You can download any of these reports here.

In addition, the Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ Research Service can create a custom report for your specific markets, tailored to your research objectives. This service includes surveying the target markets you identify and analyzing the results, including comparing them with findings from our global research. We deliver the report as part of a workshop or web conference.

To learn more about either service, contact your Parallels Account Manager or email.

According to Parallels SMB Cloud Insights 2013, with the global cloud services market for small and medium businesses expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 27%, reaching $88B USD by the end of 2015, tremendous opportunities exist for service providers that know how to monetize the cloud. Parallels Cloud Acceleration Services includes two offerings that will help you do just that—our standard Cloud Go-to-Market service and an option for Go-to-Market Execution Support.

Cloud Go-to-Market
This service will accelerate your go-to-market and launch plans by helping you to define:

• Service details, including features, functions, activities, deliverables, bundles, and pricing.
• Business processes, including the steps that customers take to order services, workflow for the online store, and end-user notifications.
• Marketing elements, such as branding and messaging.
• Commercial elements, including billing, currency, and taxation.
• A complete go-to-market plan, including channel strategy, sales enablement, and a marketing plan.

The six-week engagement includes:

• Service definition workshop: a two-day workshop focused on defining the details of your cloud service.
• Service experience workshop: A three-day workshop focused on defining the service experience for end users, plus various aspects of the service that you’ll need to set up: the order process, billing, branding, service activation, bringing new customers on board, and adding and changing services.
• Service acceleration workshop: A two-day workshop focused on defining your go-to-market plan and determining the resources required to execute it.
• Messaging and positioning review: A review of and recommendations for your cloud service’s positioning, messaging, packaging, and pricing, delivered via a web conference.

Go-to-Market Execution Support
This service extends the standard advisory-level Cloud Go-to-Market service by providing you with a marketing resource to execute your cloud plan for a period of anywhere from 12 to 52 weeks. The support includes product management, product marketing, and program management resources; developing the marketing deliverables; and developing and executing the go-to-market plan.

To learn more about either offering, contact your Parallels Account Manager or email.

Once you’ve launched a new cloud service, how do you keep the momentum going? With Parallels Cloud Business Optimization—a service that provides you with ongoing, proactive marketing support. This service will help you continually evaluate and re-tune your cloud business, so you can maximize your revenues and grow average revenue per user (ARPU). Choose from any or all of the following components:

• A post-launch assessment, including a report from Parallels and a one-day workshop. Together, these activities will help you assess the end-user experience (including the shopping cart experience, steps in bringing new customers onboard, and cross-selling and upselling) and provide recommendations for any changes that are needed.
• A release planning service, consisting of a quarterly, two-day workshop that delivers a cloud market update and defines up to five services in terms of their features, functions, activities, and deliverables. The workshop also helps you determine your service bundles, delivery strategy (hosted or syndicated), value proposition, and requirements for support readiness.
• A two-day reseller program workshop, in which we help you develop plans for expanding your business through new reseller channels.

To learn more about this offering, contact your Parallels Account Manager or email.