Quoting Linux-Watch

In a memo to their employees, the CEOs of two leading virtualization companies recently revealed that their companies have merged. Specifically, Serguei Beloussov, of SWsoft Inc. and Nick Dobrovolskiy of Parallels Inc. acknowledged that SWsoft now owns Parallels.

According to a source close to the companies, SWsoft bought Parallels "about a year ago -- but kept them very separate and very quiet." Moving forward, the CEOs said that "Parallels and SWsoft have continued to grow and succeed independently in the marketplaces in which they participate."

Sources claim that the SWsoft is finally acknowledging the partnership because news of the deal was begin to leak out. Officially, the CEOs said they were announcing the arrangement, "Because of the growing synergies between the two companies, we have decided to publicly acknowledge that Parallels is controlled by SWsoft as a means of further advancing our business goals."

Moving ahead, "each company will remain a separate entity and maintain its own brand identity and website; we will now be able to openly communicate the strengths of our respective products to our customers, partners and other external stakeholders."

Both companies have made a reputation for themselves in different areas of the growing virtualization market. Parallels is best known for its Mac desktop virtual machine program, Parallels Desktop for Mac. This program competes with Apple's own Boot Camp, as well as with virtualization leader VMWare's Fusion, which enables Intel-based Mac users to run Linux, Solaris, and Windows desktop virtual machines.

SWsoft is better known in Linux circles. The company's commercial server-oriented virtualization program, Virtuozzo, is built on the foundation of the Linux-based OpenVZ virtualization software. OpenVZ is available on many Linux distributions. Debian adopted it last year for its unstable branch. It's also available for Linux running on the 64-bit POWER architecture, and OpenVZ just became available for Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processors.

The two companies' CEOs claim that "the combination of SWsoft and Parallels means that we are the only company in the world to provide a complete suite of virtualization and automation software that includes operating system virtualization (Virtuozzo), desktop virtual machine technology (Parallels) and our range of automation solutions across all major computing platforms including Windows, Linux, MacOS and beyond."

Looking ahead, "SWsoft and Parallels will be announcing more products that will enhance the choices available to IT professionals, developers and consumers. These will include a server edition of Parallels, as well as tools for managing multiple virtualization technologies - whether from SWsoft, Parallels or other vendors -- with one user interface."

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