The company responsible for creating the popular virtualization program Parallels is now taking the name of its offspring as its own. On Tuesday, SWsoft announced that it will become Parallels in early 2008.
In addition, the company outlined a new vision of “optimized computing” for multiplatform virtualization and automation software.
Parallels, a leading desktop virtualization product for running Mac OS and Windows on Intel-based Mac hardware, is not the company’s only product but is probably its best known. The other two major product lines in the SWsoft fold are Virtuozzo, a server-based virtualization solution, and Plesk, a server control panel.
Key to the optimized computing vision is the Parallels Open Platform, which CEO Serguei Beloussov said means “enhancing Windows, Linux, Mac, x86, and ia64-based bare metal systems with innovative hypervisor-based virtualization, container-based virtualization, and a suite of complementary automation solutions.”
As it undertakes this corporate renovation, SWsoft said it will have more than 500 official partners, including Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Dell, HP, AMD, and SGI.
Stream of New Products
The company is planning a stream of new products in the new year. These include the 4.0 version of its Virtuozzo container-based virtualization software, a server-based hypervisor, major updates to Parallels Desktop and Parallels Workstation, and new virtualization management for third-party technologies, in addition to its own.
On Monday, SWsoft said it had delivered to beta testers its first release candidate of Virtuozzo 4.0. The company said in a statement that the product differs from traditional hardware virtualization solutions in that it provides “exceptional data center efficiency” because it is the only virtualization product that enables hundreds of containers to leverage hardware. “Containers” are efficient and scalable virtual environments created by the dynamic partitioning of a single Windows or Linux operating system.
According to Beloussov, the virtualization software, initially announced in September, can reduce “hardware and OS…