In this little interview we would like to introduce our sponsor Plesk, a widely used web management solution. Plesk provides everything a web professional needs to set up a website quickly and securely – including a WordPress Toolkit, an easy-to-navigate control panel, server level automation, supportability tools, and complete protection with server-to-site security core.
You have sponsored WordCamps all over. What is your main motivation for sponsoring them?
One of Plesk’s key plans is to continue innovating in the WordPress space. By anticipating becoming the market leader in WordPress management, WordCamps are the perfect place to meet the community. We are there to listen and get feedback from our existing and potential users about their needs, and what problems we could help solving them in their daily lives. Based on these real world inputs, we continue to develop the WordPress Toolkit inside Plesk.
This year, a part of our team will also participate in the WordCamp Contributor Day. We would also make sure that our engagement at the WordCamps has an element of giving back to the community.
WordCamp Europe in Paris is going to be the biggest one yet with over 3,000 attendees. What are your expectations this time around?
Plesk just became an independent company from the Parallels group in May this year and got acquired by a major private equity company. We have a lot of exciting news that we are going to present at WordCamp Europe – specifically for the WordPress audience of Plesk.
Europe – with so many different languages and cultural differences – how important is WordCamp Europe for community growth?
Plesk is a global company. The company originally grew in Europe, and partially in Russia, many years ago, with several offices distributed across the world. We are very similar to many projects or companies around WordPress, such as Automattic (who we also partner with).
We strongly believe that having a very culturally diverse group of people helps to make things better. We each have our own way of defining success in different areas, very often we complement each other very well across multiple countries and cultures.
Considering that WordCamp Europe may also be an example on how bigger WordCamps can be organised, we believe that WordCamp Europe could also be a role model for future WordCamps for the Arab world, the Asia Pacific region or Latin America!
In what way do you think you can best contribute to the future of WordPress?
We strongly believe that if you want to make money with WordPress (which most of us as web professionals, developers and agencies would like to do), you need a professional environment to build, secure, and run your websites or applications.
Besides now having community managers that contribute more actively to WordPress itself, we are focusing on solving major problems that the community is asking us to. As promised at WordCamp Europe 2016, we have been promising a properly working staging/production/cloning environment at your fingertips for everyone, running on any server. In March 2017, we have delivered this and would like to get the community’s feedback.
We would also like to discuss our future releases of Plesk and the WordPress Toolkit feature stream. Also, our plans for many more preconfigured solutions, bundles and solutions with Jetpack and/or WooCommerce that we closely develop together with Automattic and their team.
WordPress is a great environment to learn in, and you have embraced this at Plesk. How did you come up with Plesk University?
Plesk is simplifying the lives of web professionals. But what we have realised is that many web professionals are not on an expert level yet. These are just very few, but many are eager to learn. Even if Plesk is very easy to use, there are many advanced options to handle on a server, if you are or want to become a WebOps and DevOps expert besides being a programmer. With Plesk university, we cover all these aspects from a technical but also, more and more, from a business perspective. We have just made the whole Plesk University free of charge, so that we can support even more people in the community who want to become web professionals to make their living.
You have made solutions for everyone, from content managers to developers. What is your most popular solution?
All our solutions based on Plesk are basically configurations of Plesk that cover certain use cases for certain target groups of web professionals, these often have some overlaps. We are currently running over one million WordPress sites on over 377,000 servers hosted at many service providers and clouds worldwide. Whereby WordPress and the WordPress Toolkit is clearly one of the fastest growing areas of Plesk. The second fastest growing area is SSL certificates based on Let’s Encrypt (and soon also Symantec Encryption Anywhere). Every website should have SSL enabled by default today, and Plesk enables that for free at one click.
What’s the next step for Plesk?
Generally, I would describe it in one sentence to start with: Evolution is written with “R”. 😊 Especially as we got these investments into Plesk’s growth now – what is very exciting considering we are on the market since 2000!
Especially interesting is the change from hosting being a small niche to the transformation to cloud in which all the mainstream IT players are taking part. Now we are in a transformation again, that all players – traditional hosting companies and traditional IT companies like system integrators or even digital agencies alike – are transforming to become so-called cloud MSPs, including all the digital (WordPress) agencies – as most can’t compete to the innovation that Amazon AWS is providing just infrastructure to an end customer.
That means there will be just few hosting players left, that can provide economies of scale in terms of providing global infrastructure – such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Alibaba. Everyone else will need to transform its business into focusing on real business outcomes for their end customers and really understand them very well. And make money by offering a set of managed services that nobody can compete with, by focusing also on specific verticals – and then move to the next vertical.
Plesk has always been a channel business with many partners, mostly in the hosting and cloud space. Our end users are what we call Web Professionals, e.g. developers, designers, IT admins of SMBs and digital agencies.
Some of these web professionals continue to buy from our hosting partners offering Plesk. But they may also buy services on Amazon AWS or Azure, and they still need the managed services layer in many cases! And this is what Plesk is focusing on with its partner channel that includes digital agencies in the WordPress community as well!
From having been a tool for automating and simplifying the lives of system administrators for many years, we are transforming into more and more of a platform, simplifying the lives of web professionals as well as cloud MSPs. We will continue to bring innovations into that direction – if that is not only being the platform to build, secure and run websites and applications. To also offering to scale web applications such as WordPress much more simplified and through pre-configured setups (what is difficult to achieve!) as well as offer to run Plesk everywhere, cloud agnostic – with capabilities to deploy anywhere – from a single UI with a beautiful UX.
As part of this journey, and connected with our partnership with Automattic, we also anticipate becoming a market leader in WordPress management. With the latest release of Plesk in March this year, we have already added our next step, offering for the first time, a fully automated environment for staging/production, cloning and import of existing WordPress sites – that nobody else can offer today, especially not as a software platform that runs in the cloud, or on your own infrastructure – wherever you like to have it.
Thank you Plesk for sponsoring WordCamp Europe 2017 (and don’t forget to stop by their booth)
Say hello to #WCEU sponsors
Sponsors are one of the most important parts of WordCamp Europe. With their help we keep the ticket price low, and the conference open to everyone. While in Paris, visit their booths, say hello to them, and talk with them about their products and services. Wondering who these companies are? Visit the sponsors page.
Thank you to our sponsors for being an important part of WordCamp Europe <3