ScalePad, a provider of automation and optimization tools for MSPs, has acquired business intelligence vendor Cognition360.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Drawing on machine learning, predictive AI, and anonymous data from some 100 million ConnectWise PSA (formerly ConnectWise Manage) tickets, Cognition360’s solution helps MSPs compare themselves to best practice benchmarks in areas ranging from agreement and customer profitability to technician efficiency and service delivery. Adding that system to its existing portfolio of asset management and backup monitoring products positions ScalePad to help MSPs boost efficiency and customer satisfaction in a new and powerful way, according to Dan Wensley, ScalePad’s CEO.
“We see a greater opportunity to take all of the data an MSP has and has been trying to manually manage, and create meaningful reports and actions for both their business and more importantly their customers,” he says.
ScalePad investigated other MSP reporting solutions before opting to acquire Cognition360, Wensley adds. “The depth of the product and the versatility of the product were unique in the marketplace from what we examined.”
Cognition360 was already working toward adding support for Datto’s Autotask PSA and other PSA solutions before today’s purchase, and will have some of those integrations ready this year.
“We consider integrations one of our core strengths, and plan to expand that with Cognition360,” Wensley says. Lifecycle Manager, which tracks warranty and subscription renewal timing for an end user’s hardware and software, has over 40 connections to third-party solutions at present. Backup Radar, ScalePad’s consolidated multi-vendor BDR monitoring platform, currently has over 300 integrations.
Integration with other ScalePad products will arrive this year too, according to Wensley, who says that single sign-on functionality and unified billing, along with design changes aimed at making Coginition360’s user interface consistent with other ScalePad products, will be among the first updates to arrive. Deeper integrations released later will allow Lifecycle Manager to share asset-related insights with Cognition360, for example, or allow Cognition360’s software to better understand hardware and software assets.
“We are providing business intelligence around asset management, business intelligence around the backups that you’re doing, so there are abilities to cross-pollinate some of the data that is coming out of Cognition360,” Wensley notes.
Buying Cognition360 is ScalePad’s latest step toward building a product family aimed at raising MSP productivity in four areas: automation, standardization, strengthening access to information, and increasing operation maturity.
“Cognition360 fits that bill incredibly well,” Wensley says, especially in the realm of operational maturity.
Originally named Warranty Master and focused on hardware asset management, ScalePad adopted its new name in 2020 when it added software asset management to the platform as well. The company has offered a centralized view of backup status information to channel pros who use multiple BDR products since late 2021, when it acquired then independent vendor Backup Radar.
That deal came some four months after ScalePad accepted a non-controlling equity investment from private equity firm Integrity Growth Partners. According to Wensley, the vendor plans to draw on funding from Integrity to be an “aggressive” player in the mergers and acquisitions market going forward.
“We’re not done,” he says. “We have a number of targets already in process.”
Both Integrity and ScalePad’s board of directors are believers in those efforts, Wensley adds. “They have been very supportive of our thesis of continual strategic growth as well as organic growth among our products.”
In conjunction with today’s announcement, ScalePad has also appointed Ryan Sigouin, formerly of marketing agency SitePartners, its first vice president of mergers and acquisitions. Aaron Kennedy, Cognition360’s CEO, will remain with ScalePad as general manager of business intelligence and analytics solutions.
Denes Purnhauser, founder of consultancy Digital Maturity Advisors, has joined ScalePad as well as its COO.
