RENTON, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parallels Holdings Limited today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Odin Service Automation platform, along with the associated cloud management technologies, intellectual property and the Odin brand to Ingram Micro Inc. (www.ingrammicro.com) for an undisclosed sum. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2015.
Going forward, Parallels cross-platform solutions business unit will continue to operate as a standalone company under the Parallels brand (www.parallels.com). The Plesk business unit, providing web management solutions to more than 10 million small businesses and hosters worldwide, will operate as a standalone company under the Plesk brand (www.plesk.com). The Virtuozzo business unit, which develops the market leading container virtualization technology, will operate as a standalone company under the Virtuozzo brand (www.virtuozzo.com). All three business units will continue to be owned and controlled by Parallels Holdings Limited.
“We are thrilled that our long-term collaboration with Ingram Micro has reached this new milestone, as it will greatly benefit our Odin Service Automation customers, partners and staff,” said Birger Steen, chief executive officer, Parallels Holdings Limited. “At the same time, this provides us with the opportunity to sharpen our focus as a company and continue to deliver market leading products under the Parallels, Plesk and Virtuozzo brands.”
The Plesk business will be led by Nils Hueneke, a longtime leader within Parallels and Odin and a veteran in the hosting and cloud business.
“I am excited by the opportunity to take Plesk to the next level,” said Nils Hueneke, chief executive officer, Plesk. “We will be laser-focused on our core audience of web designers, developers and hosters to accelerate the evolution of Plesk as the best control panel and web management platform.”
Virtuozzo will be led by Rob Lovell who re-joined Parallels in October and most recently held leadership positions at Colt following Colt’s acquisition of ThinkGrid where he was founder and chief executive officer.
“Virtuozzo has been at the forefront of containers, cloud, PaaS and IaaS long before those words entered the mainstream,” said Rob Lovell, chief executive officer, Virtuozzo. “With newly gained focus, our customers and partners will see a faster evolution of our roadmap focused on helping them deliver on a wider range of services to their clients using the best in container, virtualization and storage technologies from Virtuozzo.”
“We believe this is a great transaction for our respective businesses, associates, partners and customers, and Ingram Micro is excited to deepen support for Parallels Plesk and Virtuozzo product lines as we acquire and increase investment in the Odin Automation platform,” said Ingram Micro executive vice president, Nimesh Dave. “Together, Ingram Micro and Odin will offer the ideal combination of expertise, knowledge and commercial relationships for all our customers and partners. Ingram Micro is committed to supporting all existing customers on the Odin platform, while continuing to invest to enhance and improve the technology for the benefit of all.”
About Parallels Holdings Limited
Parallels Holdings Limited, headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, is the parent company that owns 100 percent of the Parallels, Odin Automation, Plesk and Virtuozzo business units. The group was founded by current Executive Chairman Serguei Beloussov and has been led since 2010 by Chief Executive Officer Birger Steen. With 2014 revenues in excess of $150 million USD, the company is backed by leading industry investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight, Intel Capital, Almaz, Russia Partner, Cisco and Ingram Micro. Parallels Holdings Limited has built market leading positions in desktop virtualization, server and container virtualization, control panel and cloud service automation.
About Virtuozzo
Virtuozzo is a leading provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure software that enables service providers, ISVs, and enterprises to deliver secure, robust, and hyper-converged virtualized platforms to launch applications and cloud services. An industry pioneer, Virtuozzo developed the first commercially available container technology in 2001, which today is used by over 500 worldwide partners to enable over 1 million virtual environments running mission critical cloud workloads. For more information, please see www.virtuozzo.com.
About Plesk
Plesk is the leading cloud platform to run and grow applications, websites and hosting businesses. Companies who partner with Plesk include 50% of the top 100 worldwide service providers. It is running on over 300,000 servers, operates over 10M web sites and over 15M mailboxes. Plesk is available in 26 languages and in 140 countries. Having simplified the life of sysadmins and SMBs since the early 2000s, we today add value across multiple cloud services and effectively enable application developers. In conjunction with a simpler, more secure web infrastructure managed by web professionals and hosting companies. For more information, please see www.plesk.com.
About Parallels
Parallels is a global leader in cross-platform solutions which make it possible and simple for customers to use and access the applications and files they need on any device or operating system. We help customers take advantage of the best technology out there, whether it’s Windows®, Mac®, iOS, Android™, or the cloud. Parallels solves complex engineering and user experience problems by making it simple and cost-effective for businesses and individual customers to use applications wherever they may be — local, remote, in the private datacenter, or in the cloud. For more information, please see www.parallels.com/about.