Outgoing Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov presents his successor Birger Steen
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In his keynote address Wednesday morning at the Parallels Partner Summit (www.parallels.com/summit/), founder and chief executive Serguei Beloussov announced his plans to step down as CEO and appointed the company’s current president Birger Steen to the CEO role.
Steen will take over as CEO in April, taking on responsibility for all of the company’s functions, says Beloussov, including engineering and finance.
Beloussov says he’ll stay on in a full-time capacity at the company as executive chairman. Steen will be the single person at Parallels reporting to Beloussov.
“We need to scale to the next stage,” he said, in a conference call with analysts, explaining the impetus for the change. “We want to grow to more than $1 billion in revenue during the next [few] years, and that’s a very different stage for our business. But our business is very complex. We are part of an ecosystem enabling billions in revenue today. We enable about $2 billion in cloud services revenue for our partners today. In order to scale our business, we have to scale the business of our partners to tens of billions. We believe we would need to enable $20 billion in cloud services.”
Beloussov says he believes Steen is the ideal leader to bring the company to that next stage, beyond $1 billion in revenue, a feat he accomplished previously, leading Microsoft’s Russian business from around the $100 million mark to more than $1 billion in less than five years.
Steen joined Parallels in September, as president. In that time, he has overseen its outbound functions, including sales, marketing, product management and customer support.
“Particularly now, as essentially all players in the IT industry and the telecoms industry, large and small, are moving to the cloud,” said Steen during the call, “I see Parallels as having a unique opportunity to take the model that has evolved over the last 11 years of service to hosters, and making it accessible for the 150 million or so SMBs in this world.”
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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