SolarWinds CEO Describes Next MSP, IT Management Moves

SolarWinds (SWI) CEO Kevin Thompson is striving to build a single dashboard that will allow MSPs and customers to see all of their assets — from on premises to the cloud, from applications to end-user services. In an exclusive interview with MSPmentor and Windows IT Pro, Thompson described SolarWinds' multi-year journey, the recently acquired N-able Technologies business, and key milestones the company is pursuing for 2014.

Among the sound bites Thompson shared:

From On-premises to Cloud: Over the past five years, SolarWinds has built or acquired a range of technology to monitor and manage IT within corporate firewalls — including servers, applications, network gear, database, storage and virtualization. More recently, the N-able Technologies acquisition empowers MSPs to support businesses that have "light" or no in-house IT support.

Yes, SolarWinds' technology can manage cloud workloads, too. But Thompson offers this vote of confidence to on-premises IT professionals: "The market is still evolving. Most IT guys who manage servers, storage and network services use on-premises tools. We need to make Orion [an integrated platform] more robust than ever for those guys."

Key Focus: "The job of IT always has been to deliver application performance to the business. That's what we'll continue to help IT and MSPs to achieve." Thompson says potential rivals like NewRelic and AppDynamics "only manage the application — they can't tell you if there are system or network problems. We've got the whole solution."

SolarWinds' Overall Vision: "We'll offer complete visibility from application all the way to the end user. We have most of that technology today. Traditional IT management vendors are reducing investment and focus on managing IT systems inside the firewall. They’re running to the bright shiny object of cloud growth. The infrastructure that sits inside the firewall is not going away. We'll support it while also doing cloud. We're doubling down on that old market of on-premises IT while also working hard toward managing applications no matter where they sit."

Can SolarWinds Deliver A Single Dashboard? "Yes, we can. We’re making a lot of progress in 2014. It involves our Orion platform. It’s not a big platform solution. Instead, nine of our products plug into that platform today. We're moving storage management, virtualization, log and event management onto that platform, too."

That same type of user interface experience, Thompson said, will spill over onto N-able's N-central platform. "As much as we can, we want to give partners (MSPs) one view of their overall infrastructure in an end-to-end world."

So what makes SolarWinds unique? Thompson said you won't need to "buy all the pieces" to get the single view. Instead, you can snap in each Orion component as IT pros move along their own adoption curve. The situation is similar for N-able's N-central platform, which has multiple add-ons for MSPs.

MSP Focus

Thompson said MSPs are rapidly moving to N-able's subscription model — which also speeds the adoption of new, follow-on services. "We’re taking some of the friction out of the buying process," he stated. "My whiteboard is full of N-able ideas to make that business and the MSP industry run more easily. I won't let anyone erase it because we're hitting each priority one at a time and checking the priority off the list."

In the meantime, N-able is "two quarters ahead of where we thought we'd be with that business" when SolarWinds acquired N-able in mid-2013. Thompson pointed to the N-able management team for the fast execution on all fronts.

Come Together?

The big question from MSPmentor: Will SolarWinds ever merge N-central with the Orion platform? It's too soon for such pie in the sky thoughts. But Thompson offered up a few priorities for 2014. They included, among other things:

1. Invest in all products much more aggressively.
2. Deliver a much better story around applications and security.
3. Make MSP-oriented sales and the MSP industry even easier to grow than today.
4. Integrate database performance management into Orion and promote it aggressively.

MSPmentor will be watching to see how SolarWinds performs against those goals.