SolarWinds is acquiring Samanage, a cloud-based IT service desk software solution, for $329 million. SolarWinds will tuck the SaaS-based offering into its IT Operations Management portfolio beginning in Q2 2019, the companies indicated today.
In some ways, Samanage competes with ServiceNow, FreshDesk, ZenDesk, Zoho Desk, Atlassian's Jira Service Desk, and SpiceWorks, among others. Several of those companies are building deeper channel, VAR and MSP relationships.
SolarWinds did not specifically say if or how it would take Samanage into the MSP market, but the announcement included multiple mentions of the small business opportunity.
SolarWinds Acquires Samanage: Executive Perspectives
In a prepared statement, SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said:
“For 20 years, SolarWinds has been committed to making IT look easy by arming technology pros with the powerful tools they need to solve today’s IT management challenges. We do this by responding to well-understood, everyday problems based on input and feedback from our customers and the IT professionals that we serve, The IT Service Desk is core to any IT professional's job and it is something that they interact with every day to serve their employees.
We believe that a powerful, market-leading ITSM solution offers us another compelling product to enhance our ability to serve IT professionals in organizations of all sizes while meaningfully expanding our total addressable market, including additional cross-sell opportunities within our large and expanding customer-base of more than 300,000 customers.”
Side note: In a February 2019 interview with ChannelE2E, SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson discussed potential next-moves for IT service management and PSA disruption, though he didn't speculate about or disclose any specific acquisitions on his radar.
Added Samanage CEO Doron Gordon about the SolarWinds deal:
“IT departments increasingly find themselves at the center of employee service and digital business transformation. As IT leaders pursue new technologies to transform their business, they have the ability to grow the role of service management from an IT help desk to intelligent employee service management across all departments. Deploying an employee service management mindset, coupled with an enterprise-wide service desk platform that supports it – like Samanage -- can help increase employee productivity and better connect employees to their customers. We are excited about the opportunity to bring our products together with the reach and strength of SolarWinds to enable IT organizations in companies of all sizes to achieve better business outcomes.”
SolarWinds: More Information Coming
SolarWinds will provide additional details about the acquisition and its expected impact to 2019 financial results on the company’s Q1 2019 Earnings Call scheduled for April 24, 2019, the company added.
