Virtuozzo’s Founders Return, Intent on MSP, CSP Profits

Virtuozzo’s founders are rejoining the company in a move to help the growing independent cloud provider take its piece of the “massive billion-dollar opportunity in the market.” 

That’s per Serg Bell, one of the cofounders − and now CEO and “chief constructor” − of privately held, Switzerland-based Virtuozzo, which was founded in 1997 as SWsoft.

Bell told Channel Futures on Thursday, the day after Virtuozzo announced its changes, that Virtuozzo’s founders − he and Jan-Jaap Jager, now chief operating officer and president − have “deep understanding of cloud infrastructure and platforms and … experience in building large-scale businesses will accelerate our growth and innovation.”

As computing moves to the edge, Virtuozzo has the chance “to grow 10x by helping our service provider partners leverage these changes,” Bell said.

To that point, Virtuozzo’s founders say they’re bringing new strategies for channel partners to the table. They’re planning full system management, cloud automation and other initiatives for the company’s managed service providers, value-added resellers and other indirect experts.

Virtuozzo's Serg Bell

“In the short term, MSPs can expect faster rollouts of features to support VMware migrations and tools to improve profitability,” Bell said. “Hyperscalers are great, but their infrastructure prices are often two-to-four times higher for end customers. Virtuozzo is here to make it right for small and medium-size service providers.”
Antonio Calvelli will continue to lead EMEA sales and play a central role in the channel partner program in 2025, Bell said. The rest of the team will stay in place, too.

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“It’s a strong team that has delivered good results; we only need to grow it and enable it better,” Bell said.

One of the keys to accomplishing that lies in helping partners make a profit. 

“This means taking a more holistic approach to relationships, including providing education, training, certification, support, consulting services, and fostering technology and business partnerships with other tech vendors to benefit our service provider partners,” Bell said.

Along the way, expect Virtuozzo’s founders to maintain emphasis on attracting dissatisfied VMware users to their platform. Virtuozzo stands out as one of the VMware rivals eager to stand out as an alternative amid Broadcom's changes to the legacy brand. That won’t change. Virtuozzo’s founders intend to capitalize on the interest many VMware users are expressing around migrating to different platforms.

“VMware migrations have been an important focus for us, and we’ve made great progress in this area,” Bell said. “Several projects have successfully completed their migrations, others are in progress, and new requests continue to come in.”

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But, Bell said, while VMware migrations will remain a key part of the company’s strategy in 2025, “it’s only one piece of a broader plan.”

Virtuozzo’s founders also intend to focus the company on demand for edge-ready, gen AI-capable IaaS, PaaS and FaaS solutions aligned with web 3.0 standards. 

“We take that as our target,” Bell said.

Along the way, Virtuozzo’s founders say they’ll work to help MSPs reduce churn and improve net retention. That speaks more to what cloud service providers need help achieving than to any lack of capability within Virtuozzo or its partners’ businesses, Bell said. Rather, the cloud provider intends to help its partners “maximize growth and capital efficiency,” goals that require “complete multitenant and multiregion system management, automation, orchestration, multilevel control panels software defined hardware” to achieve.

“That will be our focus,” Bell said.

Details of the Return of Virtuozzo’s Founders

Bell brings with him a track record of building and leading software companies including Parallels, Plesk, Acumatica and Acronis. 

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He is joined by Jager, who has worked at firms including Parallels, Acronis, PlusServer and Chainstack.

“By putting their success first, we help our customers and partners thrive in the competitive cloud market, giving them the tools to embrace every opportunity it offers,” Jager said.

Virtuozzo's Jan-Jaap Jager

After that, Oleg Melnikov, a co-founder of Parallels and CTO at Acronis, is coming in as chief automation officer.

“My focus will be to streamline operations for our partners and help them deliver unmatched value to their customers,” Melnikov said. “Automation will be at the heart of empowering effortless and profitable scale.”

Alex Fine, who has led Virtuozzo as CEO since early 2019, will stay as chief revenue advisor. 

“The return of Serg and others adds a wealth of experience and a renewed strategic focus to the company that will be invaluable as we target significant growth and transformation,” he said.