Parallels, the hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced it has been named one of the top 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors as part of The Cloud 100 by CRN. CRN acknowledged the company’s focus on enabling cloud services integration with its Application Packaging Standard (APS) mechanism and that independent software vendors (ISVs) rely on Parallels service provider partners to reach millions of small and medium businesses (SMBs).

As part of a series of announcements coming out of Parallels Summit 2013, the company’s annual gathering for the hosting and cloud services industry, Parallels shared that it had significantly enhanced APS 2.0 to provide a seamless, integrated and differentiated experience across all cloud services with service bus architecture, multi-factor authentication single sign-on, RESTful APIs and HTML 5-based dynamic user interface. Additionally, Parallels launched a beta program for APS 2.0.

Signifying strong interest in APS 2.0, companies such as McAfee, Mozy by EMC and Symantec have joined the beta program, and more than 100 developers have been trained to-date. The APS 2.0 beta participants’ cloud offerings span communications and collaboration, hosted infrastructure, security and web applications.

“APS 2.0 significantly improves the delivery and experience and ultimately accelerates the adoption for a wide range of cloud services by SMBs,” said Serguei Beloussov, Chairman and Chief Architect of Parallels. “Developing a vibrant ISV cloud ecosystem that enables service providers to offer a full range of services is a strategic priority for Parallels. APS 2.0 goes a long way in achieving this goal.”

“With Parallels and APS, hosters would have everything they need to jump into SaaS delivery and it would be exceedingly easy,” said Philbert Shih, Managing Director of Structure Research, who recently wrote in an opinion piece about whether hosters will acquire software-as-as-service (SaaS) providers. “The hoster would have the advantage of being able to offer a wide range of services and even competing options alongside each other. And with something like Parallels, hosters would be able to literally make SaaS an add-on to existing hosting and cloud infrastructure services since everything – shared hosting, virtual servers, cloud servers, storage, email – would run off the same back-end.”

“We have become more focused than ever on getting Mozy bundled with other cloud services and expanding our channel sales model as evidenced by our recently revamped Mozy Reseller Program,” said Simon Kingston, Director, Global Partners at EMC Mozy. “We are really excited about APS 2.0 because it makes things very easy for service providers to include Mozy in their cloud offerings.”

Anyone interested in seeing firsthand what makes Parallels one of the coolest cloud platform vendors can apply to the Cloud Services Developer partner program through the Parallels PartnerNet portal.

About Parallels

Parallels is a worldwide leader in hosting and cloud service enablement and desktop virtualization. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with more than 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.parallels.com/spp, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ParallelsCloud, and Like Us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ParallelsCloud.