Another PSA Acquisition: Silverback Buys Two Cloud Companies

Cloud-based professional services automation (PSA) and project management companies are hot tickets. Two prime examples: Silverback Enterprise Group has acquired PowerSteering Software (cloud-based project management) and Tenrox (cloud-based PSA and project workforce management). Also today, Quest Software acquired BlueFolder, a cloud-based PSA system. Here’s the update.

Silverback Enterprise Group is an acquisition firm that builds software companies. It’s backed by Austin Ventures, a $3.9 billion venture capital firm. Silverback has acquired 21 technology companies in the past 10 years.

Silverback claims PowerSteering and Tenrox together have more than 500 enterprise customers and 150,000 active users in 50 countries worldwide. The combined PowerSteering-Tenrox business will be known as PowerSteering Software.

Different Market Segments

While PSA companies such as Autotask, ConnectWise and Tigerpaw Software are familiar to small business MSPs, Tenrox has a strong following within the IT consulting and business consulting markets. Now, Tenrox will become part of PowerSteering.

According to a prepared statement from Silverback:

“The new PowerSteering will offer customers a complete and complementary suite of award-winning PPM software capabilities for IT, Professional Services, Enterprise PMOs, Performance Improvement and Workforce Collaboration and Management. PowerSteering will continue to invest in the development and support of both Tenrox and PowerSteering product lines, and all existing Service Level Agreements and support arrangements will remain unchanged.”

Side Note: Silverback Enterprise Group is not to be confused with Silverback Technologies, a managed services platform that Dell acquired several years ago.

Quest Software Buys BlueFolder for PacketTrap

Overall, I don’t sense that Silverback will position its PSA offerings for the SMB MSP market. But PacketTrap PSA and parent Quest Software are definitely heading in that direction.

Indeed, Quest Software today acquired BlueFolder, a cloud-based PSA provider. Quest also owns PacketTrap MSP, the remote monitoring platform provider. Quest will rebrand BlueFolder as PacketTrap PSA. Moreover, both PacketTrap MSP and PacketTrap PSA will strive to balance relationships with third-party PSA providers.