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Kaseya to Buy ID Agent, Accept $500M from TPG, Insight Partners
CEO Fred Voccola says Kaseya is "ramping up," not selling out.
3 Min Read
“Doing your pre-merger due diligence is essential, but we have learned, at times the hard way, that this due diligence shouldn’t just be from a financial standpoint. Getting a full understanding of the way the incoming organization functions from a process, policies and a personal, human component (or ‘HR factor,’ as we’ve come to call it), is key. As the company doing the acquisition, you want to take your time in getting to know the organization you’ve acquired and fully understand the way that they were doing things, presumably successfully, before you came into the picture. Remember that if they were profitable before you merge, they should remain profitable afterward, so you do have some time on your side to cement the courtship before bringing things under one roof.
You need to take your time with that HR factor in an acquisition, but not from a branding perspective. We once learned in an early acquisition, and learned the hard way, that corporate communication, both internal and external, needs to have a set ‘go-live’ date and plan in place well before the transaction. On that date, you need to have all your ducks in a row so that your two teams coming together as one know exactly what they need to about the company as a whole, its vision, and how the brand is going to go to market in the future. If you let both brands co-exist separately, it will only make ripping the Band-Aid off later more difficult, more time-consuming and more costly as the departing brand becomes more and more embedded.”
—Aaron Bradley, VP of marketing, CareWorxShutterstock
Kaseya continues to shake up the IT infrastructure management market with news that it has accepted a $500 million in new investment and moved to acquire another IT company.
On Monday, Kaseya announced that it will acquire ID Agent, a threat intelligence and identity monitoring provider. The deal gives Kaseya, which already offers infrastructure protection, a footprint in end-user protection.
ID Agent’s portfolio of products include Dark Web ID and BullPhish ID.
Together with Kaseya’s IT Complete Security Suite, SMBs and the MSPs who serve them can protect user networks and sensitive data from cybercriminals, ransomware and other malicious attacks with the following suite of technologies:
ID Agent Dark Web ID to identify, analyze and monitor compromised or stolen employee and customer data.
ID Agent BullPhish ID to simulate phishing attacks to educate employees.
AuthAnvil Identity and Access Management -to provide access with multifactor authentication, password vaulting and single sign-on.
Kaseya Security Manager to scan and secure networks, servers and endpoints from unauthorized changes and cyberattacks.
Kaseya Patch Management to patch vulnerabilities in OSes and third-party software solutions.
This deal follows Kaseya’s previous strategic acquisitions of Unitrends, Spanning Cloud Apps, RapidFire Tools and IT Glue, and comes immediately on the heels of Kaseya’s announcement last week that it will accept more than $500 million from TPG and Insight Partners, which is already a Kaseya backer.
Kaseya, which says the new money give is a $1.75 billion valuation, plans to use the money to fund additional strategic acquisitions, international expansion and fund additional R&D spending investments.
In a prepared statement, CEO Fred Voccola said the investments validate Kaseya as “the only industry player that can offer these innovative, integrated solutions from a single pane of glass.”
Privately, Voccola offered more context to Channel Futures. No, he said emphatically, Kaseya is not selling out. It is instead taking advantage of the moment in time when many outsiders are looking to invest in IT infrastructure management companies poised to help millions of SMB customers digitally transform and secure their businesses. Why these companies look to the likes of Kaseya is pretty obvious.
Kaseya’s Fred Voccola
“The market is growing like nothing we have ever seen,” says Voccola. “The closest I’ve ever seen to this is what happened to tech investmenting by enterprise companies in the 1990s. Spending on IT from 1990 to 2006 in the enterprise grow at four times the rate of GDP growth. Now we are seeing IT spending in the SMB space, as we define it, growing at six times the rate of GDP growth. We are ramping up to take full advantage of what’s happening now in the industry,” he says.
When pressed, Voccola reiterated that “ramping up” in no way means “selling out.” Not to customers, partners or investors.
“Kaseya has made the decision not to do what our colleagues at ConnectWise have done, which is to sell out of the industry,” says Voccola. “We are leaning in. We are doubling down.”
In four years time, Voccola says Kaseya has the potential reach $1 billion in sales annually.
If he’s right, then technology adoption and transformation with SMBs will be a big reason why. Voccola, for one, believes that within four years, the vast majority of small and midsize businesses will go to market as technology-first businesses.
“Our strategy of providing a comprehensive IT infrastructure platform, we think, is the right one,” he says.
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