Last month Auvik appointed Mark Ralls as its first president, joining the leadership team steered by CEO Doug Murray. According to Ralls, nearly 3,000 MSPs are using Auvik’s cloud-based IT management platform today, and those partners will be “a huge part” of his focus. Ralls previously served as president and COO of Invicti Security, and before that held leadership roles at SolarWinds, Social Solutions, and Vista Equity Partners. In his first media interview, he chatted with MSP Success about Auvik’s next phase of growth and where he thinks MSPs have “a huge opportunity.” This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: Why did you take the job as Auvik’s president?
Mark Ralls: As I evaluate opportunities, I look for a place that has great products with really passionate customers, and it’s very clear that’s something that Auvik has had. The ethos of the company from the very beginning is wowing customers.
MSP Success: What skills from your background in software and private equity will you be bringing to Auvik?
Ralls: A couple of things that I really hang my hat on. One, building and leading very passionate, high-performing teams that are focused on delivering customer value. My happy place is when you are able to put frontline employees in position to do right by the customer—giving them the processes and tools they need to get their jobs done. One of the things I preach every day is, the closer you get to the front line, the closer you get to the customer, the more value is being created. My role really exists to arm our employees with the tools they need, the resources they need, the right processes so that they can serve our customers in the best way possible.
And then I am just a big enthusiast around how we can use data and analytics to better inform and focus what we do so that we can serve customers appropriately. A good example of that might be we don’t want to wait for a customer to struggle with the product. We want to proactively monitor customer adoption, customer support tickets, and proactively reach out to make the customer successful. And so how do we leverage the data that we have about how they’re using the product or how they’re interacting with us to then get to a better outcome?
MSP Success: Before your arrival, Auvik had three rounds of funding. What will the company’s next phase of growth will look like?
Ralls: We’re really focused on how do we take the next step with our managed service providers and giving them a richer, broader product experience. We’ve got one of the first cloud-native network management platforms [that’s] certainly MSP focused. We’ve now added a SaaS management product to that. As MSPs think about what their business is and where their customers are going, employees are spending more and more of their time in applications. And so it becomes ever more important that MSPs are able to serve their customers better when it comes to managing those SaaS applications. …That’s where we see a lot of potential for growth. We’re trying to help our MSPs skate to where the puck is going to be. And we know that supporting SaaS applications is such a huge part of the future.
MSP Success: What’s the revenue opportunity for MSPs with Auvik?
Ralls: First of all, very few MSPs have a specific offering today around SaaS management. And in fact, relatively few companies, I would say of any flavor, are really far along in terms of their adoption of SaaS management tools. So we think this is a huge opportunity for MSPs. We’re also working with some of our MSPs who actually just want to resell the solution [and] not bundle it into their offering. So it’s an opportunity for MSPs either where we’re selling to them and they’re incorporating [it] into their offering or whether they’re offering [it] to their customers directly.
We’ve got almost 3,000 MSPs that we serve and support and partner with today globally. It’s such a huge part of who we are that it’s a huge part of my focus.
MSP Success: How much of your revenue model comes from the channel versus direct sales?
Ralls: We don’t share specific financials given that we are a privately held company, but I will say well over 50% is channel and MSP specific.
MSP Success: What’s on your roadmap? Will you be getting into the SaaS security space?
Ralls: So from a password management perspective and in terms of automating user onboarding and offboarding, that’s absolutely in our near-term roadmap. I don’t have exact dates to share, but it’s something that we’re working hard on now, and that is ultimately a security angle. You do need to ensure that users no longer have access to their SaaS applications as soon as they might be exited from the business. You’ve got to ensure you don’t have sharing of passwords. But in terms of being a very specific security offering, that’s not where we are in the near term, but again, we anticipate that security teams would heavily leverage our product to ensure that SAS applications are being used responsibly.
MSP Success: Do you have a formal partner program?
Ralls: We launched a formal program in 2023, and it’s something that we continue to grow. We’re also planning additional updates to our channel program in 2025 [with] things like enhanced deal registration; we’re simplifying their tiers, offering a lot of benefits for partners that resell. We’ve also recently hired a director of channel, Joe Barnes, who …is hard at work looking at how we can take our channel program to the next level.
MSP Success: What are you seeing out there for pain points for MSPs as well as opportunity?
Ralls: it’s a very dynamic space right now. So there’s a few things that are happening. One, you’ve got the macroeconomic environment—higher interest rates. I think that puts pressure on end customers to say, “OK, do we really need this level of support from our MSP?” I think that has created a lot of uncertainty in the market for MSPs. At the same time, though, the tight labor market means it’s as hard as it ever has been to hire IT talent, which I think is a huge boost in tailwind to the MSP. So I think the MSP industry as a whole is as healthy as ever, but it has been a cautious spend environment for them. Hopefully, if we start to see a rate cut environment, I think that it turns to all tailwinds and all benefit for MSPs.
MSP Success: What value proposition does Auvik offer MSPs?
Ralls: At the smaller end, oftentimes an MSP may not have sufficient bandwidth to do the kind of troubleshooting required when it comes to network monitoring and understanding. [With] our ability to instantly map out the topology of the network for all of your customers and just the troubleshooting ability, including some new releases that we’ve recently come out with, it allows them to drill down and diagnose issues very quickly. It really is that force multiplier for their existing team.
When you go to the larger end of the MSP, now they’re dealing with just tremendous complexity, the number of customers that they have, the number of sites that they have, how they track all that, and how they get proactive alerting to understand what the highest priority issues are. That’s an area that we’re making big strides. We have a beta program going on right now for existing customers to try out our new version of alerting with much more intelligent alerts, much more granular controls around alerts, and how those integrate into your existing PSA or your other tools. So regardless of where you are size wise, we’re making investments to make that MSP more responsive, faster to restore issues, and ultimately more valuable to their own customer.
