Cisco has bought 1% of Parallels, the Russian-born virtualization outfit best known for letting Macs run Windows apps.

How much it paid hasn’t been disclosed but it gets a seat of Parallels board.

Suspicious because the investment seems odd, Business Insider figures it’s a sign that Cisco is preparing to strike back at VMware, which alienated its VCE joint venture partner last summer when it spent $1.26 billion to buy Nicira, whose software-defined networking threatens Cisco.

Subsequently Cisco showed off its own distribution of OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that competes with VMware’s vCloud, and bought cloud management house Cloupia.


Cisco's Cloud CTO Lew Tucker giving the Day 4 keynote at 11th Cloud Expo in Silicon Valley

Now in Parallels it’s lined up an alternate virtualization technology for its servers, a move that could let it compete with VMware and threatens VCE relationship.

Parallels said in a statement that Cisco’s equity investment supports “joint go-to-market activities to deliver industry-leading cloud service delivery capabilities” and strengthens their collaboration in “accelerating customer adoption of Parallels cloud service delivery products with Cisco cloud and data center infrastructure solutions.”

As part of the investment, Parallels and Cisco agreed to expand joint development, marketing and industry initiatives.

Cisco called the investment “strategic” and said that “in collaboration with Parallels, we are focused on offering a more efficient and easier-to-use cloud services delivery model for service providers. We are particularly excited about Parallels global presence – including its operations in Russia – which affords Cisco a continued opportunity to fuel innovation there and around the world.”

Parallels said, “by strengthening our collaboration with Cisco, Parallels is focused on accelerating its growth and offering an end-to-end solution for cloud service providers.” Those SPs would apparently be targeting SMBs.