Parallels Sees IPO, Not Acquisition

Virtualization and automation software maker Parallels hopes to go public via an IPO in about two years, CEO Serguei Beloussov recently told Bloomberg News. But Beloussov also says the company has been "casually" approached about a potential acquisition by both Microsoft and IBM. Beloussov obviously didn't bite on either of those offers, but tells Bloomberg he would consider a bid at a "significant premium."

Defining that premium for a private company isn't easy. But Microsoft makes sense as an acquirer, according to Virtualization.info: "Microsoft now has every piece of the virtualization stack: the Hyper-V hardware virtualization engine, the App-V application virtualization engine, a VDI connection broker, the security wrapper MED-V," writes Alessandro Perilli. "The only missing part is the OS partitioning technology, and Parallels is the only enterprise company that offers it at today. So unless Microsoft changed its plans or what to develop it from scratch, Parallels is the company to acquire."