SolarWinds Sees Rise In SMB Spending On Security

SolarWinds MSP General Manager John Pagliuca said the company's purchase of Trusted Metrics Tuesday boosts its security portfolio as SMBs increasingly are becoming the target of cybercriminals.

’If they go after an SMB and the SMB is not properly protected, doesn’t have a layered approach, doesn’t have the right tools like a threat detection tool, they potentially have extinction events,’ he said. ’What we’re seeing is a lot more spend in the SMB space toward security. So we’re seeing that open up and the spend in the SMB, particularly in security, overall, to outpace the general market.’

SolarWinds rival Continuum recently boosted its own cyberdefense capabilities by buying Carvir, an MSP-focused developer of monitored managed security technology. The acquisition accelerated Continuum’s plan to add U.S.-based security operations and event management tools to its products portfolio.

Pagliuca said SolarWinds' purchase of Trusted Metrics was not influrenced by Continuum's move. Instead, he said, Trusted Metrics simply has a great product. It was created by an MSSP and born from its frustration in dealing with security software.

’They were leveraging competitive software and found it to be cumbersome, found it to be slow, found it to be difficult to use, and not automated enough to really fit their need,’ Pagliuca said. ’I love to buy or leverage technology from someone who has built it from the ground up from the customer's perspective, and understanding the customer's pain point. So that for us ended up being a great marriage and why we’re excited that we made the acquisition with the Trusted Metrics folks.’

Terms of the deal for Trusted Metrics were not disclosed. Pagliuca said the deal closed in early July.

Based on technology from the acquisition, SolarWinds rolled out a new security offering. SolarWinds Threat Monitor is an automated tool designed to make it easier for an IT operations teams as well as MSPs and MSSPs to detect threats. Threat Monitor can root out suspicious activity and malware by aggregating asset data, security events, host intrusion detection and network intrusion detection, and correlate that data with continuously updated threat intelligence.

The product fits SolarWinds' mantra of simple, powerful, and affordable.

’We felt it did that in a really clean way,’ he said. ’When we looked at this solution, it very much lined up with the SolarWinds mantra of ’simple’ in that we can take really complex logs, from really anything that produces a log, aggregate it in a way that provides alerts at a level that you don’t need to be a weapons-grade security expert to diagnose, and after that they can respond to it appropriately.

’We’re not just buying great technology, we’re buying a great team,’ Pagliuca said. ’[Trusted Metrics CEO] Michael Menefee is a well-known security expert, as are a bunch of the folks on the team who have been in the space for quite some time, and even more so, they were MSSPs. We’re really excited. They’re the right company. The right technology. They’re in the right space. They built it the right way. From an MSP perspective, from a channel perspective, all those things made it the right move for SolarWinds. We’re really excited to make this acquisition.’