Lately Parallels has been very silent. The company must be fully busy in developing the new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac to stop the VMware conquer of the Apple market share, and in finalizing the long awaited Parallels Server Bare Metal.
Anyway a major news about the firm was published earlier this week on Kommersant, a Russian business magazine.
The article (Google Translate from Russian to English) reports that the investment fund Almaz Capital bought 5% of the Parallels stake for about $11 million.
The stake was previously owned by Fund Insight but Parallels bought it back to sell it again to Almaz Capital.
The article also reveals three interesting additional details:
- Acronis is a shareholder of Parallels (virtualization.info reported about a special relationship between the two in August 2006)
- Insight Fund wanted Parallels and Acronis to merge and (here the translation is confusing) to launch an IPO (virtualization.info wrote about the rumor in January 2008)
- Compared to Insight Fund, Almaz Fund agrees with Parallels CEO Sergey Beloussov that developing the company has higher priority than launching the IPO
Thanks to the Apple Blog for the news.