Oakley Capital Acquires Plesk for $105 Million

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Oakley Capital has acquired Plesk in a deal valued at $105 million, making Plesk a completely independent company from Parallels.

According to a statement by Plesk on Friday, it plans to move beyond traditional web hosting into the hyperscale cloud – offering support for WordPress management, Docker and microservices, as well as simplified cloud management.

Plesk, headquartered in Switzerland, is used by cloud service providers to manage applications, websites, and cloud businesses. As an independent company, Plesk expects to be able to make acquisitions and investments in engineering.

“The growing dominance of hyperscale cloud providers has the world’s 20 million cloud developers looking for access to faster, more secure and efficient infrastructures,” Jan Löffler, Chief Technology Officer at Plesk said in a statement. “Our main investment focus will be to develop a WordPress management tool that enables scalability, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and security that can be deployed from anywhere to everywhere.”

Oakley Capital has acquired stakes in web hosting providers in the past, including German web host intergenia AG  (which it later sold). Other Oakley Capital investments include online dating service Parship, IT services provider Daisy, and Host Europe (which is now owned by GoDaddy).

“With Oakley’s investment, we are now in a position to expand our existing channel of more than 2,500 strategic partners and accelerate deployments and go-to-market innovations. We will deliver simplified hyperscale cloud platforms for all businesses related to and dependent on hosting services,” said Nils Hueneke, Chief Executive Officer of Plesk.

According to Plesk, more than 50 percent of the top 100 global cloud service providers are its partners, and it currently runs more than 350,000 servers, automates more than 10 million websites and over 18 million mailboxes.

Earlier this year, Plesk signed a partnership with Automattic to co-develop a Plesk WordPress Toolkit, which “tool integrates and manages the growing number of key technologies used to run, build, and secure websites and applications in the cloud,” Plesk says.

"We are delighted to be investing in Plesk, which is a widely used software platform with significant growth potential in a sector we know well. We are excited to be partnering with a strong management team and we believe that our combined experience will support the business as it moves into the next phase of its development," Peter Dubens, Director of Oakley Capital said.