HostingCon 2008 Roundup

One of the most interesting panels each year is the session on hosting mergers and acquisitions by Hilary Stiff of Cheval Capital and Joe Bardenheier of Endurance International Group. If you missed it, Hilary has posted their presentation: Valuing and Structuring Hosting Company Acquisitions. For historic perspective, you can check out my writeups for Netcraft of the 2005 and 2006 HostingCon M&A sessions.

Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov is never dull, and his interview with Michael Halligan is no exception. "Google is going to eat the growth in the hosting market," Serguei predicts. "Honestly I believe Google is a true evil empire. Google is very closed, and very focused on direct control of the end customer." Microsoft, on the other hand, is "very real and very partner friendly." Beloussov says Parallels' current focus is integrating its recent acquisitions. "We're like a Python right now," he said. "We just ate a lot, and now we're absorbing. We're looking at 12-24 months to digest what we've swallowed."

Liam Eagle at The WHIR spoke with Kevin Gold of iNET Interactive, which just acquired HostingCon. Next year's show will be in Washington, DC. Liam also has a lengthy look at the presentation by Paul Hirsch of the Association of Internet and Hosting Service Providers (AIHSP), the new hosting industry trade group.

Richard Chmura of GoStats.com has a summary of Day Two of the conference that covers a lot of territory.

For a photo summary of HostingCon, check out the Flickr set from TheWHIR.