[DAILYHOSTNEWS], July 24, 2012, cPanel, web hosting control panel developer, made an announcement at HostingCon that it has acquired a financial stake in WHMCS Ltd, a billing software company to deliver a more cohesive solution that includes both control panel functionality and billing.
As per the cPanel blog post, “Under the new agreement, cPanel, Inc., will now have a financial stake in WHMCS Ltd. This strategy gives WHMCS Ltd. access to cPanel, Inc.’s vast business resources, and also allows both companies to benefit from shared expertise under a “brain trust” model. As a result, customers can enjoy tighter integration and an optimized exchange of information between the two individual platforms.”
This partnership will enable the web hosting companies to deliver fast & responsive customer service by combining both tools functionalities & thereby lowering the administrative workload within a web hosting company.
Aaron Phillips, cPanel’s VP of operations gave his thought by stating “We have felt for some time now that a much-needed component for cPanel & WHM was an e-commerce solution to automate billing, account creation, and so on, We knew if we built our own product, we would be competing primarily against WHMCS, and the challenge would be to produce something better.”
Matt Pugh, CEO at WHMCS says he originally developed the product to fill a gap he identified in the market while working cPanel & WHM himself (hence the name), building the product originally with that platform in mind. It seems reasonable to assume that whatever integration follows from the deal will only make the tool easier to use with cPanel, already a selling point for the 80-plus percent of WHMCS users that already use the cPanel control panel.
While there are obvious advantages to cPanel users, Pugh says the deal will not affect the product’s ability to work well with other platforms – it will continue to do so.
As of now, there is no concrete plan around the form that integration will take or what changes it might present to hosting providers using either tool.
