You can see the company's new logo to your upper right. That's why the company-SWSoft, that is-announced today that it plans to adopt 'Parallels' as its new corporate name starting in 2008. It seems that of the two names, however, Parallels had the stronger brand identity-much stronger, at least amongst us Mac users. And as the two continued to meld, so did their corporate identities. Over the last 12 months, the two companies have come together in the public eye more than ever before, issuing releases and announcements as a singular entity. Parallels' (now SWSoft's, soon-to-be Parallels' again) Director of Corporate Communications Ben Rudolph told us that the reason for the secret was because 'We have different skill sets and different approaches to virtualization, so we wanted to make sure that we maintained our own identities so we could stay focused.'
At the time, Parallels acknowledged that it had been acquired by SWSoft some three years prior, before many of us had become familiar with Parallels and its Windows-running goodies for Intel Macs. It was almost a year ago-on my birthday, in fact-when we learned of the previously-unknown link between Parallels and Russia-based enterprise virtualization software maker SWSoft.
