Alistair Forbes, managing director of the SolarWinds MSP division of Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds Worldwide LLC, plans to leave the company at the end of October.
Forbes was general manager of Dundee, Scotland-based LOGICnow when SolarWinds purchased that company in June and combined it with its SolarWinds N-able unit to form SolarWinds MSP.
“Having built HoundDog Technology more than a decade ago and seen it become part of GFI Software, then transitioning to GFI MAX, then LOGICnow and now of course joining SolarWinds, I feel that my thoroughly enjoyable journey with this company has reached its natural conclusion,” Forbes said in a press statement.
“While my next venture is as yet unplanned, I am delighted in the meantime to leave MSPs with far better tools and capabilities than when I first set foot in this market, and am proud to have enabled hundreds of MSPs’ growth through the use of innovative technology,” he continued. “I remain a friend of the SolarWinds family and excited by the product development plans that SolarWinds MSP is planning over the coming months.”
John Pagliuca, who has served alongside Forbes as CFO for the past three years, will be his successor. A 20-year industry veteran who has held both financial and technology management roles, Pagliuca will report to SolarWinds president and CEO Kevin Thompson.
“Perhaps the greatest strength of SolarWinds MSP is our unified, complete approach to meeting the needs of the market,” said Pagliuca in a press statement. “The acquisition of SolarWinds N-able, followed by LOGICnow, and subsequent coming together of these two organizations to form the SolarWinds MSP powerhouse—is further strengthened by our strategic alignment with SolarWinds. This ‘trifecta’, as Kevin Thompson likes to call it, gives IT professionals of all sizes and all geographies the chance to leverage their strengths while simultaneously addressing any potential gaps, with a one-stop-shop approach.
“Having worked in the rapid growth tech sector for the majority of my career, I can say without hesitation that this is a strong example of a highly scalable and comprehensive cross-platform solution suite,” Pagliuca added. “I’m excited about what’s coming as we further align our technologies and keep our ‘eye on the ball,’ and by that I mean our customers.”
SolarWinds also announced today that Stephen Garland, formerly senior vice president of engineering at LOGICnow, will also leave the company to pursue unspecified opportunities. “The SolarWinds family wish him all the best for the future,” said a company representative in a press statement.
Forbes was at the helm of LOGICnow when that company launched LOGICcards, its innovative machine learning-based predictive analytics system, which uses aggregated data from endpoints managed by LOGICnow users to anticipate future technical problems. He sounded an upbeat note about the SolarWinds acquisition in an interview with ChannelPro one day after that deal was announced. Out of the gate, he noted, SolarWinds MSP would have over 18,000 clients in the MSP community supporting more than five million endpoints and one million mailboxes, giving it an unmatched perspective on managed services trends.
“No one else has got that level of visibility,” he said, adding that the newly formed company would have some 400 engineers as well.
“What we should see is that the rate of innovation is very high,” he predicted.
The boardroom shakeup at SolarWinds MSP revealed today comes at a time of both technological change and vendor consolidation in the managed services software market. Roughly a month after the LOGICnow transaction, for example, security and managed services vendor AVG Technologies N.V. was acquired by Avast Software in a deal valued at $1.3 billion.
