Seeking to allay widespread concerns within its channel, speakers at SolarWinds MSP‘s MAX 2016 conference now underway in Edinburgh, Scotland, made emphatically clear that the company has no intention of diluting its commitment to either of its two main managed services software product lines.
“We are 100 percent behind both platforms,” said general manager John Pagliuca of its SolarWinds N-able family of on-premises products and LOGICnow family of cloud-based solutions during a morning keynote.
Indeed, providing MSPs an end-to-end selection of on-premises and cloud-based solutions spanning from RMM and PSA software to BDR and security systems is a core element of the company’s strategy for long-term differentiation in a crowded market.
“No one else can offer them that choice,” said Pagliuca in an interview with ChannelPro, adding that the company’s newly merged sales team has been trained to give MSPs agnostic advice on which SolarWinds MSP platform is right for their needs, and to help them migrate between platforms if those needs change.
“We’re really putting the customer first,” he said. “If it fits the customer’s needs, I’m happy to put them in whatever solution is the best one for them.”
Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds Worldwide LLC bought LOGICnow and combined it with its SolarWinds N-able unit to form SolarWinds MSP in June. It subsequently unveiled a unified, rebranded portfolio of products last month, shortly after Pagliuca took the new company’s helm following the departure of LOGICnow general manager Alistair Forbes.
The freshly minted company now plans to significantly boost its investments in both the LOGICnow and SolarWinds N-able product lines, drawing on funds available to it thanks to the completion in February of SolarWinds’s acquisition by investors Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo LLC for $4.5 billion.
“We have this private equity group behind us now that is willing to double down on the MSP space, so we will continue to invest,” Pagliuca said. “I guarantee you we will invest more in R&D than any one of our competitors in the entire space. That’s for sure.”
Working to put another widespread source of anxiety among its customers to rest, Pagliuca also definitively ruled out any possibility of SolarWinds MSP imposing price hikes on LOGICnow users.
“We understand that the market is a competitive market from a price standpoint and we plan on staying very competitive,” he said.
Shifting its partners’ attention away from concerns about the past to plans for the future is a big part of SolarWinds MSP’s agenda for MAX 2016. The company is positioned to start acting on those plans too, according to senior director of partner community and field marketing Dave Sobel, who conceded that the challenges of combining two businesses with different health insurance, retirement plans, and HR systems into a single entity has been a time-consuming distraction in recent months.
“None of that matters to a solution provider, but it has to get done,” he said.
Most of that work is finished though, he continued, with the technical support and marketing teams now fully merged, and the sales and partner community organizations following quickly.
“We’re emerging from that,” Sobel said of the corporate integration process, and therefore finally ready to help partners start capitalizing on the combined assets of the N-able and LOGICnow portfolios. For example, the next release of MSP N-central, the on-premises RMM solution formerly known as SolarWinds N-able N-central, will integrate with the former LOGICnow BDR system now officially named MSP Backup & Recovery. Similarly, future editions of MSP Remote Monitoring & Management, which was previously LOGICnow’s MAX Remote Management offering, will draw on remote control capabilities from the N-able product family.
Pagliuca said that while partners can expect to see more such “cross-pollination” in the future, there are no plans in the works to turn the company’s on-premises and off-premises products into a single, combined platform.
“I think they’ll start to migrate towards a similar type of path, but they’ll never be unified,” he said.
ChannelPro will have coverage of SolarWinds MSP’s product roadmap and competitive strategy for 2017 and beyond tomorrow.
