SolarWinds has acquired VividCortex, a provider of SaaS-based database performance management software, the companies confirmed this morning. VividCortex can monitor cloud and on-premises databases, a key need that represents a growing opportunity for managed IT services providers (MSPs).
Indeed, MSPs and corporate database professionals will gain the ability to manage such open source databases as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MongoDB, and Redis, SolarWinds says.
SolarWinds plans to add VividCortex to its IT operations management portfolio in Q4 2019. The SaaS-based offering will complement Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), an on-premises and cloud-deployed product.
The acquisition better positions SolarWinds against such cloud monitoring and application performance management (APM) companies as Cisco AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace and New Relic, among others, ChannelE2E believes.
VividCortex revenues were $5.2 million in 2018, according to the 2019 Inc. 5000 report. The company had a three-year growth rate of 650 percent through the end of 2018, the report says. More recent financial data has not been disclosed. Financial terms of the SolarWinds buyout were not disclosed.
SolarWinds Acquires VividCortex: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement, SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said:
“By adding VividCortex to the SolarWinds portfolio of products, we can now offer teams the ability to go deep on app traces, infrastructure monitoring, metrics, both traditional and cloud-native database performance, digital experience monitoring, logs, and network monitoring. The powerful database management solution VividCortex provides offers us another compelling product, with demonstrated ROI, to enhance our ability to serve IT professionals in organizations of all sizes while meaningfully expanding our total addressable markets.”
Added VividCortex CEO Amena Ali:
“We believe VividCortex has strong business momentum which we expect will benefit from the SolarWinds high-volume, high-velocity ‘selling from the inside’ go-to-market model to help quickly raise brand and product visibility amongst technology professionals. We now have the opportunity to promote the VividCortex product to the existing SolarWinds customer base of more than 300,000 customers to help them better manage their application environment.”
Concluded Baron Schwartz, founder and CTO of VividCortex:
“The VividCortex mission is to make every engineer awesome at databases. We’re excited to join SolarWinds, expanding their ability to serve the entire spectrum of databases and related application performance management challenges in hybrid IT environments.”
SolarWinds Acquires VividCortex: Product Positioning
It's a safe bet SolarWinds will initially position VividCortex's technology for corporate IT departments and database administrators within end-customer businesses.
But don't overlook the MSP opportunity. Over the past two to three years, SolarWinds has gradually but consistently extended its corporate technologies into the MSP market. Examples include network monitoring and management capabilities designed to counter fast-growing upstart Auvik Networks in the MSP market.
SolarWinds has remained a buyer in the M&A market, snapping up multiple businesses over the past couple of years. Examples include:
- Passportal for MSP password management;
- Samanage for ITSM to counter ServiceNow;
- 8Man for access rights management; and
- Trusted Metrics for MSSP threat monitoring.
SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson early this year clearly disclosed the software company's key priorities for the second half of 2019. They included MSP, ITSM and application management. The VividCortex deal most clearly aligns with the application management focus, but certainly has MSP and ITSM implications.
SolarWinds is publicly held, although private equity firm Thoma Bravo retains a stake in the software company. Thoma Bravo also owns such MSP-focused SolarWinds rivals as ConnectWise and Barracuda.
