Cash generated from a series of profitable quarters seems to be burning holes in the pockets of SWsoft founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov, who spent last week in London “hinting” at plans to announce several acquisitions.
Belassouv’s candour didn’t stretch to naming names, but reports in The Inquirer, citing Israeli tech-business daily The Marker, suggest a deal has already be done the deal with Sphera, a developer of software that manages multi-tenant software-as-a-service systems.
The Sphera rumour fits with SWsoft’s previous acquisition record, which stretches back to 2003 when it acquired two German software companies, Plesk and Yippi-Yeah E-Business, and continued in 2005 with the purchase of Value of Software Technology Co Ltd.
Plesk gave SWsoft a server control console that had already been integrated with its own Virtuozzo server virtualisation product, whilst Yippi-Yeah contributed yet more hosting management software with its Confixx package. Value of Software Technology was an early mover in China’s hosted service systems space, and his since become SWsoft China.
What SWsoft’s other acquisitions may turn out to be remains to be seen, but it would be no surprise if the company is planning to add more virtual machine management or provisioning tools to support both its Parallels hardware virtualisation products, and the Virtouzzo software virtualisation portfolio.
As VMware’s recent IPO has shown, virtualisation is the hot ticket in the industry right now, but insiders like Beloussov are already down-playing the importance of core virtualisation technology, and predicting that future profits will be driven by products and services that make it easier to own and deploy virtual machines
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