We released yesterday new 4PSA software packages for Plesk 9. There are a number of general improvements that affected all products (as we have 11 packages for Plesk, I will not discuss about any particular product, but about things that affected all of them):

– New installer. This installer works (for the moment) with Linux distributions that support RPM packaging (Redhat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Suse). It is very easy to install bundles or separate products with the installer, as you only have to choose the packages you want to install.

It looks like we made a mistake with the VoipNow 2 webinar schedule. Initially we planned it for 28 November, but we forgot about the US Thanksgiving Day. Therefore we fixed this mistake and rescheduled the webinar for Wednesday, 3 December 2008, 16:00GMT (US Eastern: 11:00 EST, US Pacific: 8:00 PST, Central Europe: 17:00 CET).

The 4PSA VoipNow webinar will be held by VoipNow’s chief architect and will contain in-depth information about the new system features, upgrade to VoipNow 2 process and future platform development. The system presentation will take around 60 minutes and will be followed by an interactive questions and answers session.

In order to join the webinar on Wednesday, please go here.

Finally we introduced VoipNow hosted in Europe. Servers are located in Netherlands, in a location that provides excellent connectivity to the entire Europe. We ran some latency and packet loss tests with several contries in Europe and the results are very good.

Just a quick notice that Amazon EC2

I guess you remember that two months ago I told you about a new version of Clean Server. At that time it was planned for release in September. Well, it was almost on schedule, one week later :), so right now you can download it. There are many improvements on this version, starting with the architecture and ending with the product distribution. I suggest you to read this brochure

We recently published the roadmap for VoipNow 2. VoipNow 2 is more than a new version, it’s a major evolution of the product, which differentiates the product from any possible competition. You can read more here.

We added some details on our website about 4Grid

This is an opened question to hosters, don’t hesitate to provide feedback. Over the last year we noticed something very interesting, namely hosters starting to offer VoIP to businesses. Some of our customers started on their own, while others were convinced by my colleagues (in some cases it was pretty hard). Some companies moved slowly, other positioned their products incorrectly, but most were succesful and they are very happy now.

We fell that this process takes more time than it should. Market is moving. Hosting is commodity. On a long run Google with “get” the customer. They could “get” even businesses (no business will use Google Apps now, but in two years, who knows). Microsoft is now a hoster (dangerously raising the bar for providers). It’s obvious that in these conditions hosters must expand their business. They have the customer and they can offer much more, not only old fashioned hosting. Otherwise they will lose this customer. Unified communications is an important piece in the puzzle and maybe the easiest to offer and support.

We started building resources to help hosters understand the opportunities behind unified communications, but we need your help. We are preparing for our most important release ever (VoipNow 2 – more to follow) and we want to accompany this release with many more resources to help you. Don’t hesitate to add your input.