Parallels, the hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced that small and medium business (SMB) adoption of cloud services from its partners using Parallels Automation and the Application Packaging Standard (APS) grew by more than 80 percent in 2012. This growth was fueled by SMBs who are now using an average of four cloud applications each, along with more than 50 percent of the top 30 global telecommunications providers now using the Parallels cloud service delivery platform. This is in addition to the 9,000 service providers and more than 50,000 web designers and developers also using the company’s software to serve millions of SMBs.

Parallels, the hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced the recipients of the Fourth Annual Parallels Partner Awards. Parallels CEO Birger Steen recognized thirteen companies during Parallels Summit 2013, which is being held in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace. Parallels Partner Awards recognize outstanding yearly achievements by partners who make the best use of the assets Parallels provides, with special attention given to those partners who have innovated and differentiated in the rapidly-expanding small and medium business (SMB) cloud services market.

Ravello Systems today announced the public beta of its service which enables developers to overcome their internal data center capacity constraints and leverage the unlimited resources of the public cloud to develop and test their applications faster and in a more robust manner. Ravello instantly enables developers to replicate their existing applications, without any changes, and deploy them to any public or private cloud.

With its first firmware release of the year, IGEL Technology is issuing a comprehensive update of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services for all models in its UD3, UD5 and UD9 series running Windows Embedded Standard 7. This support for Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 8.0 will allow users to take immediate advantage of the many new features that Microsoft has introduced with the launch of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

PHD Virtual Technologies, a pioneer in virtual machine backup and recovery, and innovator of virtualization monitoring solutions, announced today the appointment of virtualization and cloud expert, Roger Baskerville, as Vice President of Europe the Middle East and Africa.

Asigra Inc., a leading Cloud Backup, recovery and restore (BURR) software provider since 1986 today announced it will demonstrate cloud-based backup and recovery at the 2013 Parallels Summit in booth #519. This year's show takes place February 4-6 and is being held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. During the exhibition, Asigra will showcase groundbreaking backup and recovery capabilities for cloud service providers that leverage Parallels Application Packaging Standard (APS). Innovations to be shown include low-touch agentless deployment and operation, simple management of end-to-end physical/virtual/cloud/endpoint data backup, virtual machine disaster recovery and NIST FIPS 140-2 certified security for data in flight and at rest.

As hard as it may be to believe, yes, VMworld 2012 is right around the corner.  I hope San Francisco is ready for us!  If you are attending the event and bringing your spouse, you need to know about Crystal Lowe's Spousetivities.  This function does a really great service of providing attendee spouses with something to do while we are geeking it out learning about our favorite IT topics, virtualization and the cloud. 

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled the speaker lineup and sponsorship list for the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year, VMworld 2012.