Parallels puzzle: Bertrand Serlet, mobile apps and new motivation program

A couple of days ago, Parallels made a series of announcements that were heard in some media as separate news (for example, here and here ). I thought it necessary to make a sort of media digest, from which seemingly scattered facts add up to a clear picture.



The reasons for the news was, firstly, the loud personnel appointment of Bertrand Serlet, who worked at Apple hand in hand with Steve Jobs for almost a decade and a half, an independent director on the board of directors of Parallels. Secondly, the announcements talked about the company's work on a new project in the field of mobile technologies. Thirdly, about the expansion of the option program.

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Under the cut - quotes from different sources, which make it clear that there is a relationship between all three reasons.







On the status of Bertrand Serla in Parallels as a “prophet who knows the answers to all the questions of life” (the words of the head of Parallels development Stanislav Protasov from the official press release ) were first told by “Mac” oriented blogger Alex Patsay:

“[Cerle], in turn, I suspect, will be able to provide a considerable amount of“ insights ”[...] about the further development of the company's products.”

But what was Bertrand Serlet’s motivation to accept the Paralles offer? It turns out that Apple's top retired has been working on the Upthere cloud startup for some time, about which little is known . Cnews suggests that one of the incentives for the French to cooperate with Parallels was the opportunity to look at the real clouds from the inside.

“It’s worth remembering that automation of hosting and cloud computing is one of the main areas of interest for Parallels.”

Apple does not work on a paid model, selling cloud services to small businesses, so the need for Upthere (judging from the scattered data, they are just about that) in Parallels software experience in developing cloud software and creating a cloud ecosystem is understandable.



Already in another article, Cnews quotes Sergei Belousov, who clearly makes it clear that the Bertrand Cerlet examination was already useful for Parallels:

“Now we are conducting a large project on mobile systems, the final result of which will appear in a maximum of a year, and at best in three months. Bertrand has already given a lot of advice on its development, ”said Belousov.

The development of the project is hampered by personnel shortages, which are noticeably aggravated by young companies. Quote from a note on Digit.ru, according to which to stimulate talented developers inside and outside the company expands the option program:

“We started working on a large mobile project, and in order to attract highly qualified specialists to it, we introduced a transparent option program,” said Belousov. [...] According to him, the company is going to attract several dozens of developers to the project. ”

By the way, Parallels is really looking for quite a lot of developers and people at the level of program and product managers, and not only in the mobile direction. According to the information on the site, about 30 people are needed in development centers in Russia.



The expansion of the stock option program is to involve more engineers in it. Cnews specifies :

“Now 43% of the engineering staff is participating in the option program, in the foreseeable future we will bring this figure to 60%,” he says. “We have 34 grades [...], all engineers will participate in the option program, starting with Grade 27”. For new employees, this rule is already working, it will become universal in the fall of 2012 ”.

The article on Digit.ru mentions the number of shares that Parallels top management will send to the motivation program - this is 20-25%. This is an abnormally high proportion. Other IT companies with development centers in Russia have stakes in these packages that are incomparably more modest:

“Participants of the [Yandex] option program received nearly 17.4 million shares or more than 5% of all the company's shares. Mail.Ru has a similar program, in which about 5% of the shares are directed to options. ”

So, the arrival of Bertrand Serle in Parallels, the company's intention to collect dozens of the best developers to create cross-platform mobile applications, multi-user services in the clouds and a new option program, which very soon will include 60% of employees who have divided almost a quarter of Parallels shares - all this links of one chain.