What Acronis, Parallels and SWsoft have in common? The three companies fund part or the whole business in virtualization market:

• Acronis recently launched a new version of its backup tool, TrueImage, able to act as a physical to virtual (P2V) tool, and is expected, like many other disaster recovery firms, to launch in the near future tools to backup virtual machines from the host OS level
• Parallels offers server virtualization products for end-user audience on all major operating systems, including Apple Mac OS X, and is expected to launch solutions for enterprise and datacenter audience next year, fully competing with VMware and Microsoft
• SWsoft offers OS partitioning products providing a valid alternatives to traditional virtualization, mostly in vertical markets like web hosting, and is expected to launch centralized management solution to control also competing virtualization platforms within this year

But this is not the only thing they have in common: while at the moment all firms are separated entities, are all financed by the S&W Group, an holding founded by Serguei Beloussov. The russian entrepreneur is the CEO of SWsoft, covering the same role for Acronis until October 2005, while his name doesn't appear in direct relationship with Parallels. This tight connection, mostly for the Parallels part, has never been advertised even if Acronis and SWsoft already arranged a partnership in 2004 (note that in the annoucement Mr. Beloussov didn't figure as the CEO of both companies). The question is if and when Acronis, Parallels and SWsoft will merge together to launch a multi-form virtualization offering like the one Microsoft is building.