Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Parallels is Sold Off

Got this in my morning email.


Today, Parallels Holdings Limited (“Parallels”) announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell the Odin Service Automation platform along with associated cloud management technologies, intellectual property, and the Odin brand, to Ingram Micro. The transaction is expected to close in December 2015.


The remaining service provider businesses - Plesk and Virtuozzo - will be split into standalone companies, operating under the Plesk (www.plesk.com) and Virtuozzo (www.virtuozzo.com) brands, respectively. Both businesses will continue to be owned and controlled by Parallels Holdings Limited.


I’m also excited to introduce the new leadership of Plesk and Virtuozzo. 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. 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. I’m confident that under the leadership of Nils and Rob, Plesk and Virtuozzo will accelerate their pace of innovation and will sharpen their focus on delivering the best solutions for our customers and partners.


For more details, I encourage you to read the news release and FAQ.


Birger Steen, CEO


Earlier this year Parallels split the company in 2 and renamed the SP business unit ODIN. In 2014, Ingram adopted ODIN (then called Parallels Automation Platform) as its Core Cloud Services Platform. Not even a year later, they buy the whole thing after Parallels Holdings splits it out. Nicely managed.


Apptix, Sprint and other SPs use ODIN. I wonder what happens to them. At least, Plesk is still standing. BTW, so is Platypus.


Ingram is betting heavy on being a cloud services provider -- not a broker or distributor like it is with hardware. Read the press release: "Earlier this year the channel was set abuzz by the announcement from Ingram Micro that it was entering the cloud service provider space with three new Ingram Micro-branded and hosted cloud solutions: Ingram Micro Hosted Exchange, Ingram Micro Virtual Private Servers (VPS), and Ingram Micro Web Hosting."


ODIN/Parallels was the platform that allows Ingram VARs to order, provision and bill services like a web hosting account or an Exchange inbox. It is like the kiosk software. Now they own it.




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