Former Nimsoft CEO Gary Read is now working with LogicMonitor as an advisor, helping the fast-growth application and infrastructure monitoring company with strategy.
"I got introduced to some time ago," says LogicMonitor CEO Kevin McGibben. "The moment I met him I knew he's a like-minded entrepreneur."
Indeed, Read previously built and sold Nimsoft, a monitoring platform that CA Technologies acquired for about $350 million -- roughly 10 times revenues -- in 2010. Unlike traditional remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms in the SMB market, Nimsoft focused aggressively on midmarket MSPs -- and has since evolved to help service providers with the so-called application economy.
LogicMonitor, which launched in 2008, is cut from a somewhat similar midmarket cloth. The company offers IT management capabilities across Amazon Web Services, server monitoring, network monitoring and application monitoring. Assuming LogicMonitor's platform works as advertised, the company could be well-positioned as MSPs extend towards DevOps and Application Performance Management.
Gary Read: A 360 Degree View
Read's strategic guidance could be quite valuable as LogicMonitor seeks to navigate those opportunities and challenges. In addition to his Nimsoft experience, Read also ran Boundary from 2012 through very early 2015. But Read and Boundary's investors apparently had differing views on where to take the company -- with Read exiting in February 2015 and BMC quietly buying Boundary's assets in August 2015.
The successes and challenges at Nimsoft and Boundary give Read a rare 360 degree view of the MSP software market -- including funding, R&D, pivots from on-premises to cloud, and exits.
LogicMonitor: Next Moves?
As of November 2015, LogicMonitor had about 130 employees and had raised an undisclosed sum of venture funding. I don't know if or when the company will pursue additional funding.
During an interview with ChannelE2E today, McGibben confirmed that Read is a strategic advisor to LogicMonitor. But he declined to discuss the exact areas of discussions...
And what does Gary Read say? Perhaps his bio on LinkedIn says it all: "Helping others to grow their businesses."
