Habrainterview with Sergey Belousov (Parallels)
Sergey Belousov, one of the most successful IT-entrepreneurs in Russia, co-founder of a dozen companies, including Solomon Software, ASP Linux, Acronis, Infra Telesystems and SWsoft, answered the questions of habrazhiteli. Last in January 2008 was renamed Parallels .
Sergei Mikhailovich, share what your next business will be like, is Parallels still not tired?
Not tired. I started a lot of things for my biography and did not finish much. In Parallels, all you need to bring to some more or less embarrassing results. For me now it is - revenue of $ 1 billion.
')
If I decided to leave in a short-term perspective, I would engage in venture capital investment. First of all, in software projects, because I understand this the most.
There is information that you are interested in investing in Russian startups. Can you tell us more about this? Are there already invested projects? When was the first investment? How large is your investment fund, approximately? What areas do you pay attention to? How can I get to your note?
I do not invest anything on my own, but only through Almaz Capital or with it. I work as an advisor in this fund, where, naturally, I have some share, but my main task is to help select promising projects in the field of Internet and software development. Together with the money, the seed stage funds must necessarily introduce ideas for developing a startup business, help with connections, advice and so on. Once I, like many of those who come to the funds now, also looked for investments to support the then integrated business of Acronis and Parallels. I was on the other side. Now for this. There are a number of projects that are currently being considered, but I cannot name them until the moment of closing the deals. All invested projects are indicated on the fund's website. Get easy. However, as with any fund, just before that you need to sort out which fund is better to apply (they are of different types, invest at different stages, respectively, as venture capitalists demand and expect for themselves). It depends on whether you will initially approach the fund as an object for investment and how quickly you will understand each other in terms of revenue sharing if you exit the project.
Almaz Capital has Dmitry Chikhachev, who finances planting stages, that is, projects that require up to a million dollars. We are going to invest in 10 seed-projects, of which over time we will choose 3-5 to continue financing. We are not going to just invest in these start-ups, but to incubate them: to help draw up the right business plans, hire people who are not enough in their team, prepare for launch. In general, investments in early-stage companies are longer, because they still have nothing but an idea, and we need to create everything from scratch with them. Dmitry and I will be directly very actively engaged in such projects.
I would like to know about the future of H-Sphere and its licensees.
I understand that further development can not wait, only fixes and minor additions? And if my assumptions are correct, which way would you recommend for full transition to Plesk?
Yes, for us it is a legacy product. We are working on bug fixing and support with some improvements in functionality. We plan to accumulate all the best functionality of our legacy products based on a single solution, making it integrated with the current Parallels Automation product line. For this we are developing support for high efficiency hosting. But while this functionality is not implemented.
At the same time, we will definitely continue to support H-Sphere as long as necessary.
Why if development and support services are located in Moscow and Novosibirsk, updates localized for Russia come out much later than localized updates for the rest of the world? For example, the update for Parallels to version 5.0.3910 I can not wait for the second week, since its announcement and the availability of an available version in English.
It happened, rather, for historical reasons. Russia, until recently, was not in the focus of sales for us. With the formation of a full-fledged Russia-Baltic-CIS-Israel region, starting from this year we will simultaneously release localized versions.
Does the office in Novosibirsk close / contract? Why is the Lviv office recently closed? Not everything is so successful in Parallels?
Over the past year, we managed to consolidate our product line (this also seriously affects the number of staff). It was important to improve the engineering process, eliminate the inefficient developers who were hired by us by mistake. Now we have finalized this process, and fixing the growth of the business, we proceed to expanding the state. For the year it should grow by about 30%.
The Novosibirsk office does not close and does not contract, but continues to grow. Now there is a set of developers in the Parallels Panels division (formerly Plesk) and technical support specialists. We also hire developers in Moscow.
The Lviv office was very small, and Parallels cannot work effectively with a development team of less than 30 people. In addition, the cost of engineers was higher than, for example, in Novosibirsk, if we take into account not the salaries of employees, but the maintenance of the office in terms of one developer. On the basis of Lviv it was impossible to expand the development center, so it was decided to close it. At the same time, we offered the majority of employees to go to EPAM, with which we work very closely. All who wanted - have passed.
Tell us about the plans for Virtuozzo and OpenVZ.
For many years, we have been developing the functionality of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux and Windows in order to allow hosting providers to maintain high-performance servers and offer services on their base at the most competitive price. In 2010, we will expand the functionality of both these virtualization solutions at the OS level, as well as our own hypervisor, as well as combining both of these technologies - Parallels Server Bare Metal. Combining the performance of containers and the flexibility of virtual machines based on a single platform, this solution allows you to create a truly heterogeneous virtual environments and satisfy all the requirements for the operation of hosters virtual clouds, and also provides simple common management tools and APIs.
OpenVZ is evolving rather evolutionary than revolutionary. We are actively developing the kernel: in the near future, we will release a kernel with support for an NFS server inside the container, a little later - with “lightweight” bouncers (to improve performance). Soon there will also be a new vzctl. Future plans include porting to the RHEL6 core, but the RHEL4 and RHEL5 cores will also be supported. A separate front is the work of integrating OpenVZ into the mainstream core.
They wanted to add support for your platform to their CRM, but they didn’t find any clear information on how to do this - they are chasing links around the website, nobody answers emails.
If you have a local Russian project, please contact Konstantin Anisimov, Parallels Director of Marketing in Russia and the CIS (ak@parallels.com), if global, then Brian Goode, Vice President of Business Development of Parallels (bgoode @ parallels. com).
I would like to hear plans for using my own hypervisor. What is its market, what are the pros and cons?
The Parallels hypervisor underlies all desktop virtualization products, most notably the most popular Parallels Desktop for Mac. (By the way, I was surprised at how the Internet users reacted to the publication of Macworld benchmarking tests for three products, including ours. I was pleasantly surprised). Today, the hypervisor supports more than 2 million PCs. We continue to actively develop its architecture. And even integrate into their server solutions - Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal, which I have already mentioned.
When will you have an adequate personnel policy? At least in the Novosibirsk office.
What exactly is wrong? Mass layoffs like many just because the crisis has come, was not. Discrimination on any grounds not noted. Lunches fed. Layoffs were point-like - the ballast was dumped, which had long had to be dumped.
As I have already said, over the past year we have increased the efficiency of the engineering process, developed criteria for assessing the quality of personnel work - the requirements have increased. Now, in accordance with them, we have opened a set of employees, incl. in Novosibirsk office. In my opinion, these are adequate and quite logical measures.
Sergey when you buy Cpanel, and install Parallels world hegemony?
We do not plan to buy Cpanel. We will work on developing our solutions: Parallels Panels and Parallels Automation.
Sergei Mikhailovich, share what your next business will be like, is Parallels still not tired?
Not tired. I started a lot of things for my biography and did not finish much. In Parallels, all you need to bring to some more or less embarrassing results. For me now it is - revenue of $ 1 billion.
')
If I decided to leave in a short-term perspective, I would engage in venture capital investment. First of all, in software projects, because I understand this the most.
There is information that you are interested in investing in Russian startups. Can you tell us more about this? Are there already invested projects? When was the first investment? How large is your investment fund, approximately? What areas do you pay attention to? How can I get to your note?
I do not invest anything on my own, but only through Almaz Capital or with it. I work as an advisor in this fund, where, naturally, I have some share, but my main task is to help select promising projects in the field of Internet and software development. Together with the money, the seed stage funds must necessarily introduce ideas for developing a startup business, help with connections, advice and so on. Once I, like many of those who come to the funds now, also looked for investments to support the then integrated business of Acronis and Parallels. I was on the other side. Now for this. There are a number of projects that are currently being considered, but I cannot name them until the moment of closing the deals. All invested projects are indicated on the fund's website. Get easy. However, as with any fund, just before that you need to sort out which fund is better to apply (they are of different types, invest at different stages, respectively, as venture capitalists demand and expect for themselves). It depends on whether you will initially approach the fund as an object for investment and how quickly you will understand each other in terms of revenue sharing if you exit the project.
Almaz Capital has Dmitry Chikhachev, who finances planting stages, that is, projects that require up to a million dollars. We are going to invest in 10 seed-projects, of which over time we will choose 3-5 to continue financing. We are not going to just invest in these start-ups, but to incubate them: to help draw up the right business plans, hire people who are not enough in their team, prepare for launch. In general, investments in early-stage companies are longer, because they still have nothing but an idea, and we need to create everything from scratch with them. Dmitry and I will be directly very actively engaged in such projects.
I would like to know about the future of H-Sphere and its licensees.
I understand that further development can not wait, only fixes and minor additions? And if my assumptions are correct, which way would you recommend for full transition to Plesk?
Yes, for us it is a legacy product. We are working on bug fixing and support with some improvements in functionality. We plan to accumulate all the best functionality of our legacy products based on a single solution, making it integrated with the current Parallels Automation product line. For this we are developing support for high efficiency hosting. But while this functionality is not implemented.
At the same time, we will definitely continue to support H-Sphere as long as necessary.
Why if development and support services are located in Moscow and Novosibirsk, updates localized for Russia come out much later than localized updates for the rest of the world? For example, the update for Parallels to version 5.0.3910 I can not wait for the second week, since its announcement and the availability of an available version in English.
It happened, rather, for historical reasons. Russia, until recently, was not in the focus of sales for us. With the formation of a full-fledged Russia-Baltic-CIS-Israel region, starting from this year we will simultaneously release localized versions.
Does the office in Novosibirsk close / contract? Why is the Lviv office recently closed? Not everything is so successful in Parallels?
Over the past year, we managed to consolidate our product line (this also seriously affects the number of staff). It was important to improve the engineering process, eliminate the inefficient developers who were hired by us by mistake. Now we have finalized this process, and fixing the growth of the business, we proceed to expanding the state. For the year it should grow by about 30%.
The Novosibirsk office does not close and does not contract, but continues to grow. Now there is a set of developers in the Parallels Panels division (formerly Plesk) and technical support specialists. We also hire developers in Moscow.
The Lviv office was very small, and Parallels cannot work effectively with a development team of less than 30 people. In addition, the cost of engineers was higher than, for example, in Novosibirsk, if we take into account not the salaries of employees, but the maintenance of the office in terms of one developer. On the basis of Lviv it was impossible to expand the development center, so it was decided to close it. At the same time, we offered the majority of employees to go to EPAM, with which we work very closely. All who wanted - have passed.
Tell us about the plans for Virtuozzo and OpenVZ.
For many years, we have been developing the functionality of Parallels Virtuozzo Containers for Linux and Windows in order to allow hosting providers to maintain high-performance servers and offer services on their base at the most competitive price. In 2010, we will expand the functionality of both these virtualization solutions at the OS level, as well as our own hypervisor, as well as combining both of these technologies - Parallels Server Bare Metal. Combining the performance of containers and the flexibility of virtual machines based on a single platform, this solution allows you to create a truly heterogeneous virtual environments and satisfy all the requirements for the operation of hosters virtual clouds, and also provides simple common management tools and APIs.
OpenVZ is evolving rather evolutionary than revolutionary. We are actively developing the kernel: in the near future, we will release a kernel with support for an NFS server inside the container, a little later - with “lightweight” bouncers (to improve performance). Soon there will also be a new vzctl. Future plans include porting to the RHEL6 core, but the RHEL4 and RHEL5 cores will also be supported. A separate front is the work of integrating OpenVZ into the mainstream core.
They wanted to add support for your platform to their CRM, but they didn’t find any clear information on how to do this - they are chasing links around the website, nobody answers emails.
If you have a local Russian project, please contact Konstantin Anisimov, Parallels Director of Marketing in Russia and the CIS (ak@parallels.com), if global, then Brian Goode, Vice President of Business Development of Parallels (bgoode @ parallels. com).
I would like to hear plans for using my own hypervisor. What is its market, what are the pros and cons?
The Parallels hypervisor underlies all desktop virtualization products, most notably the most popular Parallels Desktop for Mac. (By the way, I was surprised at how the Internet users reacted to the publication of Macworld benchmarking tests for three products, including ours. I was pleasantly surprised). Today, the hypervisor supports more than 2 million PCs. We continue to actively develop its architecture. And even integrate into their server solutions - Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal, which I have already mentioned.
When will you have an adequate personnel policy? At least in the Novosibirsk office.
What exactly is wrong? Mass layoffs like many just because the crisis has come, was not. Discrimination on any grounds not noted. Lunches fed. Layoffs were point-like - the ballast was dumped, which had long had to be dumped.
As I have already said, over the past year we have increased the efficiency of the engineering process, developed criteria for assessing the quality of personnel work - the requirements have increased. Now, in accordance with them, we have opened a set of employees, incl. in Novosibirsk office. In my opinion, these are adequate and quite logical measures.
Sergey when you buy Cpanel, and install Parallels world hegemony?
We do not plan to buy Cpanel. We will work on developing our solutions: Parallels Panels and Parallels Automation.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/83111/
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