Acquisitions in the RMM platform space continue, with NinjaOne announcing its intent to acquire Dropsuite this week. Dropsuite is an Australian public company that provides cloud data backup, archiving, and recovery solutions. The transaction is valued at approximately $252 million (USD) and is expected to close in the first half of 2025, subject to approval.
NinjaOne has been partners with Dropsuite for almost a year, Erzan Uygur, vice president of business and corporate development at NinjaOne, tells MSP Success. During that time, he says, “We got to build a strong relationship across the board with both the Dropsuite folks and also our joint partners, and throughout those conversations one thing that became very clear to us was that Dropsuite, very similar to Ninja, is a product- and partner-first company that prioritizes the success and well-being of their customers and their employees above all else. From a cultural standpoint, that aligns incredibly well with how we approach the market.”
Until the transactions goes through the approval process, Uygur says NinjaOne can’t comment on how the companies will be integrated, both product wise and partner program wise. “We look forward to coming out with a strategy that’s going to be beneficial to both us and our channel partners. But we’re not going to be able to engage on that front until the transaction is completed,” he says.
Similarly, Uygur says they can’t comment on plans for Dropsuite’s leadership team. However, he says, “I can confidently tell you that one of the reasons why we’re so excited about Dropsuite is the people that made the company what it is today. So hopefully that gives you a perspective on how we think about things.”
Is the NinjaOne Dropsuite Acquisition a Strategic Move?
According to data from Canalys, NinjaOne climbed into the No. 3 spot in the RMM/PSA market share in Q324, moving ahead of N-able. The other top players in that space—Kaseya, ConnectWise, N-able—have all made acquisitions to build out their platform offerings. Most recently, N-able acquired XDR/MDR Vendor Adlumin, ConnectWise acquired Axcient and Skykick, and Kaseya acquired SaaS Alerts.
In a conversation last year with Sal Sferlazza, CEO and co-founder of NinjaOne, Sferlazza said they did not have plans to build out their platform with a cybersecurity acquisition or a PSA acquisition (Ninja last year rolled out a bundle with its partner HaloPSA), but rather would continue partnering. Said Sferlazza at the time, “Our DNA is always to build great products and scale out the R&D team.”
Dropsuite is Ninja’s first acquisition. Asked if the acquisition was a response to recent competitive moves, Uygur says, “We’re responding to our customers’ feature and product requests. The reason we set out to partner with Dropsuite in the first place was that our customers were the ones that provided us the feedback around this use case. Our approach is going to be to go in the direction that our clients and partners are asking us to versus responding to some sort of a market trend. And I think overall in the long run that is the right way to approach the market in general because there will always be competing companies that do things differently, but for us, the most important thing is addressing the customer feedback that we receive, and this is why we invest so heavily on customer engagement, customer advocacy, and customer success.”
And Yet … Are More Acquisitions on the Horizon for NinjaOne?
With one acquisition under their belt, will there be more coming? “Sal is a engineer and a product owner through and through, so his preference still remains building first versus trying to acquire technology,” Uygur says.
As for Dropsuite, he adds, “This was a serendipitous case of right place, right time, right team, right product. Our goal was never to go out and try to find a company to acquire. We were looking for a partner that could complement our platform and add more value to our customers. That’s what fueled our partnership in the first place.”
The acquisition, he adds, “is going to unlock more value for our joint customers. So although we didn’t set out to make an acquisition, it became very clear that this would be a net benefit and a positive development for Dropsuite, for us, for our joint customers. So I don’t think our perspective on acquisitions has changed. We look at this as kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Uygur declined to comment on how much (or little) customer and partner overlap the two companies have. But he did say, “We believe that this is going to be accretive to both businesses and it’s going to be beneficial for the market overall.”
