Charter's Cloud Services on a Roll, Thanks to Parallels

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable company in the United States (for those keeping score at home), has chosen to go with Parallels Automation to deploy its SMB-aimed cloud service offerings. Charter Business, the enterprise services division of Charter Communications, used this week’s Interop conference to announce that since deploying Parallels Automation from Parallels, the company has signed “thousands” to its so-called Custom Hosting offerings.

Charter’s cloud services currently consist of hosted Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, domain registration, web hosting and website management in various tiered levels. Charter Business noted that Parallels Automation also will be used to migrate tens of thousands of existing users over to the offerings.

Charter Business is promoting the fact that customers can self-serve their own cloud offerings on an a la carte basis, opening the door to customers who may or may not have dedicated IT staff. To hear Charter tell it, customers are happy and they’re staying with the company, with retention rates shooting up.

This seems to be exactly the niche Parallels has wanted to fill with Automation all along: helping service providers deploy messaging to customers the company would never otherwise reach.

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