SolarWinds CEO Explains Acquisition of LOGICnow

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If CEO Kevin B. Thompson is correct, the newly formed SolarWinds MSP will offer the most complete range of IT solutions in the managed services provider (MSP) space.

The new firm is the product of last week’s announced merger between SolarWinds N-able and LOGICnow, creating a services management vendor with more channel partners than all of their top competitors, combined.

About three years after acquiring N-able and its remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology, SolarWinds completed a deal for LOGICnow, which the CEO says gives the combined firm the ability to meet the demands of any manager of IT environments – regardless of their size or the size of their customer base.

“Whatever you need to have managed, we’re going to provide you the ability to manage it; and however you want to have it managed, we’re going to provide that ability also,” Thompson said.

“So if you want to do it yourself, we’re going to provide the ability to do it yourself,” he said. “If you want to have someone else do it for you – like the MSPs – then we’re going to provide the MSPs with the technology they need to solve all of those problems.”

It’s fair to say the acquisition has been at-least on the drawing board for much of the past decade.

Thompson and LOGICnow CEO Walter Scott met in 2006, and struck up an acquaintance that blossomed into a friendship.

The pair had lots of conversations over the years about all manner of topics, including talks related to the potential market and technological synergies of their firms.

This year, the two companies finally decided to pull the trigger and make the deal happen. Once the decision was made, completing the merger took about five months, Thompson said.

Strategically, company officials said, pulling together the marketing and engineering resources of the companies made perfect sense.

SolarWinds had been selling licenses and services management technology to larger MSPs, long before its purchase of N-able in 2013.

The N-able deal gave SolarWinds a new presence among mid-market MSPs and their SMB customers, Thompson said.

But while SolarWinds’ N-able platform was ideal for MSPs and IT managers with roughly four or more technicians, the company lacked a product that was ideal for truly small IT managers, the CEO said.

“Our product just wasn’t designed to be as easy to use and as simple as those organizations might need to meet their own needs or the needs of their customers,” he said.

The LOGICnow MAX Remote Management platform, on the other hand, is known for its ease of deployment.

Users need only log in and start using the tool, with little or no onboarding support.

Still, Thompson said, the LOGICnow platform scales well for the needs of larger and growing companies.

As a result, the deal allows SolarWinds MSP to serve the complete spectrum of IT management organizations, from small to large, with customers ranging from small businesses to large enterprises.

Thompson expects exciting new technologies from the integrated research and development operations of the two companies, which total more than 300 engineers with centuries of combined MSP software development experience.

“That whole team is safe,” he said.

Financially, SolarWinds MSP expects a continuation of the success they’ve experienced since the takeover of N-able.

That firm has gone from essentially a break-even business, to a company with 40 to 50 percent year-over-year growth, and operating margins above 40 percent.

Thompson said the new company will leverage a worldwide network of more than 20,000 channel partners with more than 400,000 small- and mid-sized business customers, and should immediately generate $150 million to $200 million in annual sales.

That market presence is likely to be unmatchable by SolarWinds MSP’s competitors, he said.

“What we’ve now created is, in the MSP market, no matter how small you are or how large you are…no matter how large your customers are or how small your customers are, we at SolarWinds can now provide a set of solutions that meet all of your needs,” Thompson said. “That’s what we were trying to accomplish.”