Early last week, one of our board members, Serguei Beloussov, was named in the Financial Times as one of the top “25 Russians to watch.” The list of Russia’s top “movers and shakers” includes politicians, bankers and journalists; all people that have made an impact not only within their field but that have been recognized for going above and beyond.
“It is an honor to be on this list, and a testament of how cloud computing, specifically cloud IT services for small businesses has become the leading force in the IT sector,” says Serguei.
Optimized Computing
His vision for “optimized computing,” as he called, it started before he founded Parallels. Parallels was merely a vehicle for that vision. He saw computing moving towards automation, virtualization and minimization of cost: the cloud before it had the name “cloud.” In 1999 he started SWsoft (the precursor to Parallels) as an answer to the problems he saw with personal and server computing.
It wasn’t long before others began to catch the vision and wanted what Parallels was offering: for many years, Parallels was doubling their revenue year-to-year. The Cloud that we all know and use for everything wouldn’t be possible without automation and virtualization. Things like scaling, server fail-over, one-click installations and dynamic resource allocation wouldn’t be available without the kind of products Parallels was making in its early days.
The Cloud
The Cloud as we know it—the cloud made of up all the public and private clouds across the globe—is made of a network of automated and virtualized data centers. This cloud of hosters around the world is what makes of The Cloud.
13 years ago, Serguei saw the future of computing on the horizon and he created the company that helped bring that wave to the shore. That was in 1999. Today, Serguei serves on the board of our company, Jelastic, the company he sees as enabling the next wave of Cloud Computing. 2012 will be the year of the Platform-as-a- Service. The next step forward in computing is to lower the barrier to innovation. Jelastic is the answer to that problem.
Part of the next wave in Cloud Computing will be the elimination of lock-in that has been a problem with previous PaaS offerings. Jelastic is standard and doesn’t lock a developer into coding their App for the platform or having to change their code to change service providers. With Jelastic, developers can go between hosting service providers and not have to change their code, just upload and go!
The Financial Times gives Serguei credit for being “one of a number of entrepreneurs building bridges between Russia and Silicon Valley.” Part of that bridge is Jelastic. As one of board members, Sergeui is helping us define the next generation of Cloud Computing and PaaS. Currently, he is working full time at Runa Capital, an early stage VC fund that he founded.
The next wave in computing is starting now. Are you going to join in or watch from the sidelines? You can still try out Jelastic for free. With no lock-in and one-click installations, Jelastic has made Java Hosting so easy it's fun. Sign up for free today.