SolarWinds MSP Discusses IPOs, Integrations, and Customer Success Investments

SolarWinds made clear when disclosing the possible spin-off that it views the move as one with potential rewards for itself and SolarWinds MSP alike. Both companies, said Kevin Thompson, the company’s president and CEO, would come away from the deal better positioned to focus on their somewhat different priorities, which are long-term growth in the quickly expanding managed services market for SolarWinds MSP and “maintaining our best-in-class profit margins” for its parent company.

According to Pagliuca, however, other critical stakeholders would benefit too. “It’ll be really good for our partners and for our customers and the MSPs that are out there,” he said during yesterday’s online conference.

More specifically, he elaborated today, parting ways with SolarWinds would free SolarWinds MSP from the compromises that inevitably come from being part of a larger organization with complex goals and objectives.

Consider acquisitions, he says by way of example. SolarWinds MSP has made plenty in recent years, including password management and documentation vendor Passportal last year and a string of additional specialists in security and other disciplines before that. Yet buying businesses consumes money and time, so SolarWinds sometimes prioritizes deals with big potential strategic or bottom-line implications at the expense of smaller transactions that a managed services-only vendor might jump at.

“Sometimes for me a $2 or $3 million acquisition that might be strategic might not really show up on the radar for this billion-dollar organization,” Pagliuca says. “Now I get to apply a different kind of filter, a filter that’s much more MSP centric.”