Charter Business is offering cloud-based services to small- and medium-size businesses by working with services enablement vendor Parallels.
Charter Business, the commercial services arm of Charter Communications, is offering customers of its data services a more complete business-class platform by bundling Microsoft Exchange with domain registration, Web hosting and website management. The new Custom Hosting platform allows for multiple packages types, such as Starter, Basic, Advanced and Premium, that differ on the standard number of e-mail accounts and Web hosting parameters.
Charter Business launched Parallels Automation in the middle of last year in order to include Web hosting and hosted exchange in its service offerings. Charter Business Cloud services have been launched across its entire footprint.
The Parallels platform automates the full lifecycle of integrated operations and business system automation for service providers – from service management and provisioning to customer self-service and data center management.
“Once our customers sign up and register a single domain, they can then register multiple domains if needed and set up a website and email addresses in a single place using an integrated platform,” said Pete Hicks, senior director of Charter Business product management.
Since launching Parallels Automation, Charter Business has added thousands of new Custom Hosting customers and will eventually migrate tens of thousands of mailboxes in its first year.
“From an engineering point of view, we received a lot of support from Parallels to help us get Parallels Automation integrated and ready for our customers,” said Hicks. “Their support has helped us launch our new bundled products quickly and reduce support time and cost.”
