Popular virtualization vendor Parallels has a very complex story.
At beginning of 2004, just after VMware acquisition by EMC, the german company Netsys GmbH entered the virtualization market as third virtualization player, with a product called twoOStwo, mainly focused on IBM OS/2 virtualization, which was provided by a russian development team called Parallels Ltd.
After just four months, in April 2004, this new solution completely disappeared for unknown reasons.
One month later, in May 2004, twoOStwo re-surfaced with the new name Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA), owned by a company called Serenity System International. Parallels Ltd. was still in charge for development but NetSys completely disappeared.
After one year of limited progresses the SVISTA project has been abandoned, and in September 2005 Parallels launch its virtualization solution once again, this time as independent vendor, under the name of Parallels Workstation.
Six months later virtualization.info discovered Parallels was actually controlled by russian entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov, already owning another virtualization vendor called SWsoft and disaster recovery provider Acronis.
Few months later, finally SWsoft unveils this relationship and publicly declares acquisition of Parallels.
Now Parallels and its owner SWsoft are going to face a lawsuit from original financier Netsys, which believes original twoOStwo copyrights are infringed, and just requested a full trial in Berlin count court to determine how much of original product is still inside today’s Parallels solutions.
Despite its result, this trial may impact on Parallels products distribution at least in Germany, where Netsys is determined to enforce its rights as much as possible.