Friday, June 03, 2016

Interview Posted: Alistair Forbes Talks About the SolarWinds Acquisition of LogicNow

I had a great conversation with Alistair Forbes, the new Managing Director of SolarWinds MSP (formerly the General Manager at LogicNow).


In case you missed the news yesterday, SolarWinds MSP bought LogicNow. LogicNow CEO Walter Scott now becomes the Executive Vice President of Solarwinds MSP. And Dave Sobel retains his title as Senior Director of Partner Community and Field Marketing. I exchanged a few emails with Dave as he's traveling in Portugal right now. He is very excited and positive about the changes ahead.

Change brings uncertainty, and I've received lots of emails and requests for information about this merger. So I asked Alistair to join me for a quick conversation to answer the big questions. This interview is about 15 minutes.

The new SolarWinds MSP now boasts 20,000 partners, 15,000 of which came over from LogicNow. One of the early questions is, what happens to each of the RMM platforms. The immediate answer is that both platforms will be supported going ahead. The old N-Able platform is an on-premise solution while the former LogicNow platform is cloud based. Alistair is clear that both platforms will be supported for the foreseeable future.

Long-long-term, of course, it makes sense to figure out how to merge the platforms, but that's certainly not something that will happen immediately.

One big factor is that the average SolarWinds partner is much larger, with a big emphasis on large enterprises. So we talked a bit about how that affects the RMM platforms as well as related technologies (security products, RMM, patch management, data analytics, etc.).

Last year LogicNow introduced the first Big Data product - LogicCards - into the MSP space. Adding a huge number of larger MSPs into this data collection will open up all kinds of new opportunities. The really cool component is that this data is not just about the MSPs themselves, but also their millions of clients and managed endpoints.

We also touched on the philosophy of partner education, which has been strong in both SolarWinds/N-Able and LogicNow companies. So continued investments in education will certainly play a large role going forward. On a related topic, both companies also share a commitment to building a true community where partners enjoy open communication with SolarWinds MSP and with each other.

As always, I am impressed with the LogicNow team's openness and willingness to directly answer the major questions being asked online and in the forums. It's a period major change, so there's some natural "fear uncertainty and doubt." But it looks like a great move in the right direction for LogicNow partners.

Everything will come more clearly into focus in the months ahead. For now it looks like partners can expect stability and business as usual until the new partners develop a next-generation roadmap for the future.

More information about SolarWinds MSP is here: http://www.solarwindsmsp.com/

More information about LogicNow is here: https://www.logicnow.com/


:-)

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