I’ve just returned from Parallels Summit 2010. I attended the summit with two colleagues, our Business Development manager and our Director of Business Operations in Americas. It was a very good event for us, with lots of discussions and findings. I will share some of the most important things below.

– VoIP gets more traction. With each year the number of hosting companies coming to us increases. They realize the importance of UC for their business.
Many hosting providers are still scared about VoIP because they don’t understand the market and the technical issues. Many of them are really interested to receive education.
– I met three different guys who built an in-house hosting platform for delivering VoIP for their hosting business. All of them want to switch to VoipNow, they realized that the business is no scalable this way — too many technical issues and always behind the market.
– Unified Communications was highlighted as the next major opportunity in all keys notes I attended to. We have known this for a couple of years, good to see that the market started to understand it. 🙂
– I met people who still believe that cheap means good business. I am sure that some of them will have a different opinion next year, if still in business.
– We met customers/prospects that tried other products before going with VoipNow. They started to love VoipNow.
– We met people that had various problems setting up VoipNow Professional. We are working to identify these issues, in both usability and documentation.
– I learned that Microsoft could put some PBX features in their OCS in two years. 🙂 I would like this to happen; more user education is needed on this market sector.
– Our Cloud Calling slogan was noticed by many executives I talked to. On a funny side of things, the summit started with a keynote from an IDC analyst who remarked that the public telephony was the first very successful cloud.
– I identified some points in our products that need investment in the following weeks. We will start this process on Monday, agility is very important here. 🙂

And not lastly, Parallels Summit is really an event to attend. Miami Beach was great, the location was very good (although quite expensive, especially the bar :)) and the people exceptional.