A Capital Idea

Some of you may have seen some news from Cisco yesterday detailing a large investment in Parallels from Almaz Capital Partners (aka the Cisco Russian Fund I). This great news has received a lot of chatter... Almaz Capital Partners was looking for strong technology companies that share roots in Russia and they found the perfect match with Parallels! As many of you know, Parallels is an international company with a Russian connection: it was founded in Singapore by people born in Russia. Today we still have a large R&D base in Russia, as well as offices across the globe, including Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, the UK, Japan, China and two in the USA.

So why did Almaz Capital Partners want to get involved with us? The company focuses on investment to help accelerate the development and innovation of new technologies in the Russian digital market; a market rich with talent. Since Parallels’ has a record of relentless innovations – Containers-based server virtualization, Coherence mode for running Windows applications transparently on Mac OSX as if native, and Direct Assignment for native 3D graphics in a VM – we are a natural fit for Almaz.

The news might seem surprising given the current economic climate; however, Parallels continues to be a great investment as we enable SMBs, enterprises and consumers to save money on IT almost instantly and of course we think we do it better than anyone else! It looks like Almaz Capital Partners might agree, and a big factor in this is the role we play in enabling >cloud computing. We provide automation and virtualization solutions to cloud computing providers, underpinning a model that offers SMBs benefits including reduced upfront investment and ongoing cost of ownership, greater flexibility and simpler management.

From a purely financial perspective, Parallels’ revenues are growing despite the difficult economic environment and we continue to beat our targets while maturing and optimizing our operations. What could be a better investment target?! And our view of Almaz Capital Partners? We’re lucky to be working with a really good group of people who understand Parallels’ goals, agree with them, and have been familiar with the company for a while.