Q&A with CloudPOST’s Contributing Editor, Kathy Xu
Lukas Hertig, CMO and VP Marketing at Plesk, spoke with CloudPOST about the company’s upcoming participation at HostingCon Global 2017, which will take place April 3-6 in Los Angeles. Plesk is planning a major announcement for HostingCon, and Mr. Hertig also gives his viewpoint on the greatest challenges within the cloud industry and how he sees Plesk growing in the next few years.
CloudPOST, Kathy Xu (CP-KX) Question: Tell our readers about your company: What do you do and what problems are you attempting to solve?
Plesk, Lukas Hertig (Plesk-LH) Answer: Plesk is a web-based control panel and WebOps platform that is increasingly the preferred choice for hosting companies and web professionals. The integrated environment of all related services on a server in a single and intuitive user experience provides everything web professionals need to build, secure and run websites and applications for their customers. Plesk also allows any web hosting providers to more easily manage thousands of virtual hosts on a single server for large scale installations.
CP-KX Q: What has your company achieved that makes it unique in the industry?
Plesk-LH A: Plesk is the only platform that offers companies the option to host websites on both Linux and Windows OS with full feature parity. Our ready-to-code environment in an intuitive interface for web developers helps focus on developing and scaling web applications rather than administering infrastructure or managing security. Our platform helps developers and hosting companies get to market faster by addressing the most common challenges and providing multi-language support. In addition to the core platform, we enable our clients and partners to extend and customize Plesk as an open platform. The rich and open ecosystem over 50 Plesk extensions not only provides access to even more relevant features targeted at specific audiences, but also enables service providers of any size to generate unique upsell opportunities.
CP-KX Q: What do you think is the greatest challenge in the cloud industry?
Plesk-LH A: By far the biggest challenges in the cloud industry are three major shifts. One is that reaching economies of scale in terms of cloud infrastructure is becoming more and more difficult due to hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Second, due to that, the “traditional” hosting providers are facing huge challenges to stay competitive in that market. Third, everyone in the whole IT industry wants to become a cloud service provider in some form, directly or indirectly.
One of the opportunities to overcome these challenges, especially for the “traditional” hosting providers, is to focus on and transition towards becoming a managed service provider, with integrated offerings where they control the multi-cloud or even hybrid value chain. Combined with creating targeted solutions for specific end customers, this will be the only way to survive in the medium and long terms and keep their customers. That service might be deployed within the service provider infrastructure, the customer infrastructure or even in combination with hyperscale infrastructure as a hybrid environment.
CP-KX Q: How are you looking to strategically guide your business within the next few years?
Plesk-LH A: Over the next few years we are focusing on four main components that will move our platform to:
- Become a leader for WordPress automation tooling, serving web agencies and web professionals by delivering best-in-class WordPress Management with WordPress Toolkit 2. As example by providing support for test environments and production stages out-of-the-box with deployments to cloud infrastructure.
- Provide best-in-class solutions for web professionals by growing our ecosystem of Plesk extensions and offering best solutions for every major use case of our customers.
- Help to create auto-managed services using Plesk. Providing automatic security on any level or operations and intelligence will help our customers and partners to drive better margins when creating solutions for their website customers.
- Drive growth for hosts by allowing Plesk to utilize cloud infrastructure – for example by creating staging environments on cloud servers or deploying websites and web apps on new machines without having to install the server first.
CP-KX Q: What would you like to accomplish at HostingCon?
Plesk-LH A: As a sponsor at this year’s HostingCon event we are excited to speak with attendees and announce our latest version of WordPress Toolkit 2. We will also be featuring our new extension catalog and the ability for hosting companies to generate additional revenue by adding features to the core product that are normally not part of any web platform. As always, our staff will be on-hand to provide demonstrations and answer any additional questions about our platform while being able to re-charge at our charging station.
CP-KX: Thank you for your time and best of luck at HostingCon. Readers, if you are interested in learning more about Plesk, the leading WebOps platform and control panel to run applications, websites and hosting businesses, visit https://www.plesk.cloud/.
If you would like to attend HostingCon, please register by clicking here. Follow all things HostingCon on Twitter with the hashtag #HostingCon.
