Like a chess match, the top MSP platform providers have been making strategic moves this year and getting key pieces in place as they all vie to be the winners in what Canalys’ chief analyst Jay McBain calls “the platform economy.”
On Monday this week, ConnectWise announced it is replacing CEO Jason Magee with Manny Rivelo, former CEO of Forcepoint. That leadership change came just two weeks after the company’s acquisition of Axcient and SkyKick, and a little more than a month away from their big user conference, IT Nation Connect in Orlando, Florida, on November 6-8.
And today, at its ORBIT24 conference in the U.K., HaloPSA announced a bundled offering with NinjaOne as a single license with what the company calls “a great price.”
One could argue that Kaseya made the opening move in this year’s chess match in April. That’s when the company announced Kaseya 365, an all-in-one bundle with extremely aggressive pricing.
Who Are the Players? A Look At The “Big 4”
ConnectWise, Kaseya, N-able, and NinjaOne (in that order) currently hold the top 4 spots in the RMM/PSA market, according to Canalys.
ConnectWise, Kaseya, and NinjaOne are all private companies with PE investors.
- Insight Partners acquired Kaseya in 2013 and appointed Yogesh Gupta as CEO, taking over from founders Gerald Blackie, Mark Sutherland, and Paul Wong. Current CEO Fred Voccola succeeded Gupta in 2015.
- Thoma Bravo acquired a majority stake in ConnectWise in February 2019 after founder and CEO Arnie Bellini sold the company. Magee, who was COO at the time, was promoted to president/CEO.
- NinjaOne in February raised a $231.5 million Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth. Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake; and Amit Agarwal, president of Datadog; among others, also invested in the round. NinjaOne remains a founder-led business, with Sal Sferlazza in the CEO spot.
N-able (formerly SolarWinds MSP) spun out from SolarWinds and became a public company in 2021. John Pagliuca (formerly the president of SolarWinds MSP) took the helm as CEO and president. N-able also has two primary private equity owners: Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake Partners.
A PE investment “basically triggers a seven-year thesis and regardless of what happens, they’ve got to kind of do something in that timeframe,” said McBain in an interview earlier this year. That might mean the current investors re-up or new investors come in, he explained. Regardless, the investors want to see how their investments are working, he said. “The venture capital industry is pretty well understood by now. And we know that all [of the big] three are kind of in a mode that in the next 18 months to two years, there has to be something that happens.”
As for what that “something” might be in different interviews through this year, everyone is playing it close to the vest. Both Kaseya and ConnectWise put new CFOs in place this year.
Voccola, who has overseen dozens of acquisitions since taking over, told MSP Success this in April: “I want to be one of the six most valuable software companies in the world … by the end of this decade.” Will he take the company public? “No short-term plan,” Voccola says. “Here’s what our bankers would say. Given our size, this company will be a publicly traded company at some point. But nothing has to happen. The chances are that will happen. Does that happen in the next 12 months? No. Does that happen in the next 36 months? Maybe. Is this a publicly traded company in the next five years? Yes, most likely.”
ConnectWise weathered speculation of being acquired last year. Ameer Karim, EVP and GM for cybersecurity and data protection at ConnectWise, told MSP Success last week: “There’s always conversations about ConnectWise in the news. I can’t comment on any of those things. Right now, myself and the other leaders of ConnectWise are focused 100% on building great solutions, delivering a great platform, and making sure that we can make it easy for people to do business with us.”
Asked about Magee’s departure, ConnectWise user Robert Cioffi, CTO and co-founder of Progressive Computing, an MSP in Yonkers, N.Y., said, “I wish Jason well in his future endeavors and whatever life has in store for him next. The growth of the company during his tenure is undeniably impressive, and Jason deserves a lot of credit for that. But I also think it’s good that a company as large and complex as ConnectWise has a change of leadership every once in a while. I don’t know Manny Rivelo at all but looking forward to a fresh set of ideas and style. His resume is impressive as well. But, my only concern, and I’m probably being premature here, is that Manny lacks direct MSP ecosystem experience. I’m not saying that’s a problem, but he is going to need to learn and adapt quickly to the mindset of MSPs.”
As for N-able, Reuters reported in May that the company was exploring a sale after attracting acquisition interest, with Barracuda mentioned as a buyer, but that has not come to pass as of yet. Back in March, Pagliuca suggested to MSP Success that it might’ve been looking to acquire. Said Pagliuca: “In 2024, what I tell folks is, we’ve been generating a good amount of cash, and we intend to put that cash to good use to help the MSPs move their agenda forward. So yeah, we look to be acquisitive. I’m not going to tell you [what type of company we are looking to buy], but what I would say is, we’re organized by three business units. … What I can guarantee you is it’ll be within those three business units.”
The Posturing
All four MSP platform players have somewhat different roadmap strategies. Kaseya, while it integrates with non-Kaseya products, wants to “own the kit” as Voccola often says, and has poured significant investment into acquiring software companies and integrating them deeply into the platform. N-able has both built out its platform and touts its “ecoverse” vision, an open ecosystem for connecting disparate tools for cloud and on-premises resources. NinjaOne, which focuses primarily on endpoint management, partners for cybersecurity and PSA, with Sferlazza saying, “Our superpower is it’s all single stack, all single code base. The best and brightest minds at Ninja are all working on the same problem. It gives us a velocity that none of our competitors can match because we’re all on the same tech stack.”
ConnectWise, for its part, has always advocated for an open ecosystem for MSPs, and has been building out its Asio platform. When asked if the acquisition of Axcient and SkyKick represent a change in strategy, Karim said, “We’ve been advocating that the MSP community always needs an open ecosystem. MSPs need choices. And I think that’s been the whole premise of ConnectWise … but at the same time, there’s an opportunity to innovate on various solutions. Data protection was something that we felt was another opportunity to further innovate. And there’s only so much that we can do from existing vendors out there and innovate, because you really can’t touch their products, you can influence them, you can give them feedback, and we felt that there was an opportunity to further innovate.”
He added, “We’re the only ones in the industry that has a full unified platform, the Asio platform. Axcient to some extent has already been integrated and we’re on the path of integrating SkyKick as well.”
Asked to comment, Voccola said, “I do think that ConnectWise has realized that their strategy of having a giant pool of loosely integrated third parties doesn’t work. And I think now they are trying to follow our lead. I think they’re 4 or 5 years behind, but I’m glad to see it. And we wish them the best.”
The Pricing Gauntlet
Kaseya threw down the pricing gauntlet with the introduction of Kaseya 365. It was part 1 of the company’s mission to “change the unit economics” for MSPs, or in other words, make MSPs more profitable and efficient.
“Everybody has an opinion on the [Kaseya] technology itself and how smart that is to buy into one vendor. But it was an impactful announcement for one-third of this entire managed services market who struggled with profitability,” said McBain.
For ConnectWise’s part, Karim said, “We’ve got an amazing solution where you can buy RMM plus cybersecurity plus layered data protection. It’s been around for over a year and we’ve got a very compelling price out there for our MSP partners. … We’ve got bundles where soon you’ll be able to buy RMM and PSA and cybersecurity and everything else together. … We’re focused on delivering best-in-class solutions that our partners need, not because it’s price driven. … But I would say that I think there’s just misunderstanding out there that Kaseya is the only one offering the best-in-class pricing.”
Asked about NinjaOne’s just announced bundle with HaloPSA, Rahul Hirani, SVP of product management at NinjaOne, told MSP Success, “You can always expect that all of our partnerships and product development are customer-driven. We’ve had a close partnership with Halo for a while. Our MSP customers need both a strong PSA and RMM solution, and our integration with HaloPSA brings together these best-in-class solutions to best serve our customers. Together, we make MSPs more efficient, secure, and productive.”
However, Sferlazza said in an earlier interview, “Ninja is not going chase lower [price] at all costs. We want to make our MSPs successful and we think using Ninja helps in that differentiation for them.”
NinjaOne user Corey Kirkendoll, president and CEO of 5K Technical Services, an MSP in Allen, Texas, sees NinjaOne’s move as a competitive response to Kaseya. “This is a direct response to what Kaseya is doing. I think you will see this with all of the big vendors. They are finally responding to bundles and better pricing that we as MSPs have been asking for, for a long time. It will simplify some of our biggest pains like billing and reconciliation.”
Year-End Checkmate?
Both Kaseya and ConnectWise have their big year-end conferences coming up. Voccola has been teasing that one announcement at DattoCon in October “may be about an acquisition. It may be about enabling MSPs to do things they couldn’t do before. It may be about providing a huge amount of new capabilities to MSPs that not only allow them to become incredibly more efficient, but to generate additional revenue.”
This announcement will represent the second step in Kaseya’s four-part plan to change the unit economics for MSPs. Asked if it will enhance the ability to be a security-first MSP, something he continually stresses, he replies, “I think components of what we’re going to be talking about, 100%, yes. And that’s a theme [for Kaseya].”
At IT Nation Connect, which follows a week later, attendees will likely get their first introduction to the new CEO, and Karim said to expect announcements around AI and RPA (robot process automation). “And then of course you’re going to see a lot more interesting things and announcements around data protection.”
As for winner and losers in the platform market, will we see “Zugzwang”?
It’s a German term used in chess to describe a situation where a player is forced to make a move that weakens their position. It occurs when every possible move results in a disadvantage for the player, typically in endgame positions with few pieces on the board.
McBain doesn’t think so. “I could go industry by industry by industry, segment by segment, and the platform economy is usually between three to five winners, with four being the most common.”
