Plesk APAC Partner Day Event 2018: My Experience and Key Takeaways

Plesk APAC Partner Day event began on Oct 12, 2018, at Suntec Convention & Exhibition Centre, Singapore.

The event started off with a lot of excitement among APAC partners to meet and connect with Plesk experts.

Why I attended the Plesk APAC Partner Day Event?

Being a tech enthusiast, I am always looking for new opportunities to network and connect with like-minded people in this industry. Among so many other events that take place, I specially attended this one.

Here’s why:

• To get the first look at what’s coming up in 2019 from Plesk.
• Learn how to turn my tech expertise into revenue by adding managed services.
• Look for ways to address my customers’ journey even without a large marketing budget.
• Find the best go-to-market strategies and trends that will be essential for mutual business success in today’s market.
• See better ways to enter new customer segments with more targeted solutions.
• I also grabbed the opportunity to share my views at this event.

Key takeaways

This half-day conference turned out to be a great place to help us grow in this fast-changing industry with leading offerings. Here are some key takeaways:

#1 Learning about the company’s journey

Plesk CEO, Nils Hueneke, highlighted some of the important moments of their company’s journey, introduced new team members, and also provided a high-level overview of the Plesk strategy. 

#2 Plesk Roadmap for 2019

The next session was addressed by Jan Löffler, CTO of Plesk. He took this opportunity to remind everyone how they covered a long way from being a basic control panel to become a powerful web ops platform.

He revealed some of the big secrets of the Plesk Engineering team.

We also saw a sneak peek of what’s coming next from Plesk in 2019.

#3 Becoming the constructor’s champion

Markus Galler, VP of Sales at Plesk, discussed how we can reconstruct our framework with minimal efforts to enhance security and traction, reduce pitstops, and more.

He provided some great insights into how we can turn our infrastructure into a true solution for our customers’ needs.

#4 Cyber Protection Solutions with unprecedented ease

This session was addressed by Steve Goh, a leader with +25 years of experience in the IT industry. He shared how service providers can easily, efficiently, and securely deliver an array of next-gen data protection.

In this rapidly growing Cloud market, service providers are incorporating cloud solutions into their product portfolio to generate revenue with no upfront costs.

For this, he offered a solution where the service provider can defend end-user data from modern threats by using a single console to manage backup, disaster recovery, file sync and share, notarization and e-signature services.

#5 Challenges faced by hosting providers

Patricia Hillebrand, Director of Global Channels at Plesk highlighted the biggest challenges hosting providers need to tackle in today’s world.

In her session, she also mentioned ways to tackle these challenges by offering some of the best practices on how to overcome the problems – even with a small marketing budget.

#6 Surviving in the current onslaught of hyperscalers

Dondy Bappedyanto, CEO of Biznet Gio Cloud explained how Hyperscalers will continue to dominate the Cloud market. According to him, it is almost impossible to compete against hyperscalers.

He suggested another way around – rather than competing, hosting companies have a huge opportunity to create new services and benefit from the current Cloud wars between big IaaS players like AWS, Google, Azure, and Alibaba/Aliyun.

#7 Adding value to a hyper-scale world

Continuing on the discussion about Hyperscalers, Philbert Shih, Founder and MD of ‘Structure Research’ shared his insight.

He stated that the public cloud will continue to gather momentum and make it even more difficult for service providers to compete for raw compute and storage infrastructure. He addressed this issue and provided a solution with Structure Research.

#8 Speeding adoption of TLS towards a secure Internet

The recent requirements by Chrome that all sites be secured using TLS were addressed by Jeremy Rowley, Executive Vice President of Product for Digicert.

He put forward his predictions on how TLS will change over the next year.

This prediction will definitely help us understand how the industry works and help us prepare to address those changes.

The new normal – what are the key factors to economic success in hosting today?

Last was the panel discussion about the key factors to economic success in hosting today. I was part of the panel with 5 other members:

• Jamin Andrews – Conetix
• Andy Saw – Exabytes
• Yusuf Nurrachman – Rumahweb
• Sabarinathan Sampath – Racknap/ZNetLive
• Philbert Shih

We started our discussion by addressing the question about which strategies should hosting companies choose to stand out from the crowd and sell profitable services to customers.

During our 60 minute session, all panelists provided their insight on how managed services can become a cash cow.

The discussion included who the ideal target audience is, what WordPress users are actually looking for, and how hosting companies can monetize the market trends.

Wrapping Up

If you would ask me if I’d like to go to such an event again, I would reply YES, Definitely!

Plesk Partner Day Event had so much to offer to me and other tech experts.

It gave me a new perspective to look at things and connections with some awesome people.

Ohh and The Gifts