Absolute Performance announced it is expanding the partnership with virtualization and hosting automation company Parallels to better enable managed services and hosting providers to achieve a strategic foothold in the expanding SaaS and On Demand marketplace. The announcement centers around extending Absolute Performance's application performance management SaaS software and services to work more closely with Parallels' virtualization and data center automation products.

Partners since 2007, the announcement covers three areas; Absolute Performance is expanding support for Parallels Virtuozzo Containers within the SaaS delivered System Shepherd application performance management software. Next, Absolute Performance is announcing its support for the Application Packaging Standard and will add support for APS applications. The two companies will also continue to collaborate on future integration initiatives to bring deeper application performance management capabilities to virtualized SaaS and On Demand applications and hosted environments.

"Extending System Shepherd to support Parallels Virtuozzo Containers and APS applications means our partners and customers have the comprehensive performance management capabilities and end user experience validation required for virtualized SaaS environments," said Jerry Champlin, Absolute Performance CEO. "Parallels is the closest thing to a standard within the hosting environment and Absolute Performance is excited to take our partnership to this next level."

"We are very pleased to see our partnership with Absolute Performance expand to support our exciting direction in SaaS," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "Application performance management and virtualization are vital to our SaaS and hosting customers, and we are very pleased Absolute is joining us in supporting the Application Packaging Standard."

• What Yahoo Exiting Hosting and SMB / SaaS Means to Hosters