Plesk announced today that it has completed its separation from Parallels Holdings Limited having been acquired by mid—market private equity investor, Oakley Capital Private Equity (Oakley Capital), in a transaction valued at $105 million (€95.9 million).
As an independent company and with Oakley Capital’s investment, Plesk will move beyond traditional web hosting into the hyperscale cloud. By forging a strong partnership with Automattic — who operate WordPress.com, Plesk anticipates becoming the market leader in WordPress management. Plesk will offer web professionals push-of-a-button access to advanced tools like Docker, support for microservices, and simplified cloud management.
Jan Löffler, Chief Technology Officer, Plesk said in his statement, “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. 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.”
Plesk, headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, is one of the most used WebOps platforms to manage specialized applications, websites, and cloud businesses. This investment marks a step to advance with new acquisitions and engineer the Plesk platform for the future.
“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.
Plesk is a strategic partner to leading web companies. This includes Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and Docker. The company has also signed an agreement with Symantec to provide Encryption Everywhere. And alongside Kolab — the company behind Roundcube, the most popular open source webmail provider — Plesk developed a secure premium email option focused on privacy.
Earlier this year, Plesk signed a partnership with Automattic to co-develop Plesk’s WordPress Toolkit. The management tool integrates and manages the growing number of key technologies used to run, build, and secure websites and applications in the cloud. With a simplified ecosystem, developers, designers, and website builders can easily scale and secure websites and deploy changes quickly and efficiently. Also, the tool integrates with multi-server functionalities like Docker so users can stay on top of the most innovative web technologies.
“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,” commented Peter Dubens, Director of Oakley Capital.
Plesk will continue to share advancements about its progress in simplifying the lives of web professionals with cutting-edge innovations.
