Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola issued the following statement, minutes after the announcement today that SolarWinds had completed an acquisition of LOGICnow, joining the two service management solutions providers.

“We see today’s acquisition news as a direct reaction to the same market conditions which have driven Kaseya to launch ‘IT Complete’, the industry’s first-ever growth platform for MSPs. Neither N-able nor LogicNow (formerly GFI) have ever evolved much beyond basic end point management and are now reacting to innovations such as Kaseya’s in order to remain relevant to their customers.”

“Their customers should be concerned about this M&A event not only because of the massive debt that SolarWinds is taking on in order to fund it – which in itself will require massive cuts in R&D and support to service it — but the uncertainty around which product will survive when they merge the two product lines.”

“What we see with N-able and LogicNow is that their customers typically come to us when their needs scale beyond 500 end points, not only because of the performance limitations of their platform, but more importantly, because they don’t have the automation, policy management and ease-of use required to enable their customer’s staff to operate efficiently. The only rationale we can see to this acquisition is that N-able is planning to merge their platform with LogicNow (or EOL one or the other), creating a lot of turbulence for their customers.”

“The challenges that Autotask and ConnectWise have is that their customers spend a disproportionate amount of their expense dollars on internal ‘below the line’ functions such as, CRM, billing and service desk. These functions do not help their customers grow their business. Even if they had the products to address MSP 2.0 functionality (which they don’t), their customers are unable to free the expense dollars required to invest in the build out and launch of these advanced services. That is why Kaseya invested heavily in our PSA, but priced it aggressively to help our MSP partners devote their precious capital to meeting their expanded customer needs.”

“The battle that Continuum and Tigerpaw are fighting is one of relevance. As the market aggregates, the opportunity for standalone vendors decreases and if I were them I would be exploring my strategic options as I believe their days as independent companies are numbered.”

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