Plesk Acquired by Oakley Capital

Plesk receives pivotal investment from Oakley Capital and embraces the future of cloud, WordPress management, and DevOps

Today, I am excited to share with you that Plesk has completed the separation from Parallels Holdings Limited, having been acquired by Oakley Capital.

Fully focused and committed to the cloud and hosting industry

As an independent company backed by Oakley Capital’s experience and investment, Plesk will now expand beyond traditional web hosting into the hyperscale cloud. Evolving to become an all-in-one platform, we will offer web professionals push-button access to advanced tools like Docker, support for microservices, and simplified cloud management, and accelerate innovation to remain ahead of the market and our users’ needs.

As CEO, I’m personally extremely excited that, with Oakley’s investment, we are now in a position to further empower 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!

Jan Löffler, our Chief Technology Officer, also shared with me his vision to supply the world’s 20 million cloud developers with a WordPress management tool that will enable scalability, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and security that can be deployed from anywhere to everywhere.

For us, this investment marks a step to advance with new acquisitions and engineer the Plesk platform for the future.

Strategic partnerships with the best and brightest

At the core of our growth strategy is to work alongside the best and most innovative in the industry. We’ve forged strategic partnerships with industry giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud, and also innovation leaders like Docker, Symantec to provide Encryption Everywhere, and Kolab — the company behind Roundcube, the most popular open source webmail provider — to develop Plesk Premium Email that is focused on privacy.

Earlier this year, we signed a landmark partnership with Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com — the world’s most popular open-source, online publishing platform, currently powering more than 26% of the web — to co-develop the Plesk WP Toolkit. With more than 1 million WordPress installations already running on Plesk, our WP Toolkit has been extremely well received by our users, and within the WordPress community.

In the words of Peter Dubens, Managing Partner at Oakley Capital: “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”.

About Plesk

Plesk is the leading WebOps platform to run, automate and grow applications, websites and hosting businesses. Plesk is running more than 377,000 servers, automating over 11 million websites and 19 million mailboxes. Available in more than 32 languages across 140 countries, 50 percent of the top 100 service providers worldwide are partnering with Plesk. Plesk has simplified the life of SysAdmins and SMBs since the early 2000s and continues to add value across multiple cloud services.

About Oakley Capital

Oakley Capital comprises Oakley Capital Private Equity L.P. and its successor funds, Oakley Capital Private Equity II and Oakley Capital Private Equity III, which are unlisted mid-market private equity funds with the aim of providing investors with significant long term capital appreciation. The investment strategy of the funds is to focus on buy-out opportunities in industries with the potential for growth, consolidation and performance improvement.

Plesk media contact:

Lukas Hertig, CMO at Plesk
[email protected]
+4179 601 19 89

Oakley Capital media contact:

Oakley Capital
+44 20 7766 6900
Peter Dubens, Managing Partner

FTI Consulting LLP
+44 20 3727 1000

Edward Bridges / Stephanie Ellis

Liberum Capital Limited (Nominated Adviser & Broker)
+44 20 3100 2000

Steve Pearce / Henry Freeman / Jill Li