Virtuozzo has had a executive restructuring with founder Serg Bell returning to the CEO role, along with other senior exec changes, as the company focuses on the small and medium enterprise (SME) VMware switcher opportunity.
The Swiss-based company provides Virtuozzo Hybrid Cloud (VHC), open source-based hyperconverged cloud technology that combines cloud services with a single web interface for MSPs. This has evolved into Virtuozzo's Hybrid Infrastructure (VHI), "a best-proven, commercially supported, and cost-efficient replacement for VMware and Nutanix," and Virtuozzo has ambitious expansion and innovation plans.
Bell, formerly known as Serguei Beloussov before shortening his name, stated: "I am returning to Virtuozzo as its CEO and Chief Constructor, together with many of the original founders, to lead the company into an efficient, cloud-driven, GenAI, and edge-ready future for infrastructure, platform, and application stacks." So the GenAI boom has led to yet another company's strategy to be reshaped.
Bell added: "One of the top priorities of Virtuozzo is helping our partners grow in profitability by increasing revenue, reducing churn, improving net retention, adding new customers, and driving new ARR growth. One of the key solutions to achieving this goal is Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure - a proven, profitable, and efficient replacement for VMware and Nutanix."
The dissatisfaction among VMware's SME customers following Broadcom's takeover provides Virtuozzo with another opportunity, thanks to its competing hyperconverged infrastructure software stack.
Bell has a record of founding and leading software companies including Parallels, Plesk, Acumatica, and Acronis, creating over $5 billion of value. A major stake in Acronis was recently sold to private equity business EQT.
He takes over from prior CEO Alex Fine, who previously referred to himself as the chief energy officer and now serves as a chief revenue advisor. We're told "his expertise will be vital and valued as the new strategy unfolds."
Jan-Jaap Jager is the new COO and a veteran of several of Bell's companies, such as Parallels (six years) and Acronis (11 years). Oleg Melnikov, a co-founder of Parallels and CTO at Acronis, also joins Virtuozzo as chief automation officer.
Virtuozzo says it is repositioning itself as a complete platform for alternative cloud providers, with a new strategy to equip service providers with full system management, cloud automation, and multi-level delegation panels to help them grow their profits.
Up until now we viewed VHC as designed for the channel, hosted by Virtuozzo and its network of Cloud Service Provider partners, and available at locations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions. It offered MSPs a set of cloud services it claims they can sell at lower cost than AWS, Azure, and GCP. They feature:
VHC has evolved into VHI and Bell now wants a hands-on role to drive the VMware switcher opportunity for this, stop Nutanix encroaching into his business, and take advantage of GenAI and its smart chatbots to enable his MSP customers to do more, possibly with fewer people.
Jager said: "We empower our customers and partners to take back control of their IT infrastructure by simplifying complexity with innovative, user-friendly solutions. One example is Virtuozzo Application Platform (formerly Jelastic), which automates application deployment, scaling, and management across private, public, or multi-cloud environments."
Melnikov added: "My focus will be to streamline operations for our partners and help them deliver unmatched value to their customers. Automation will be at the heart of empowering effortless and profitable scale. Together, we will accelerate innovation and fuel growth across the cloud industry."
We're told Virtuozzo will build its support for new and existing Service Providers and hundreds of thousands of SMEs so they can unlock the full potential of IaaS, PaaS and FaaS (Function as a Service) capabilities. The company aims to deliver a full, open, and extensible modern platform and applications stack for complete automation, system management, service level management, orchestration, and control panels.
Smaller MSPs take note. This strategy emphasizes leveraging partnerships, founders (Constructors) ecosystem, generative AI, and software-defined infrastructure to enable competition with hyperscaler clouds.
Virtuozzo is available as public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud software across more than 680 cloud service providers and managed service providers, with hosting providers in 84 countries.