Michelle Accardi took the reins as CEO of Liongard in April 2023, succeeding co-founder Joe Alapat. In the past year and continuing into January 2025, Liongard has brought several new leadership team members on board. The company also added Cyber Asset Discovery and Inventory and Advanced Automated Documentation to its MSP-focused attack surface management platform in 2024, and introduced Managed Attack Surface Solution for SMBs, midmarket, and enterprise clients. MSP Success sat down with Accardi to talk about Liongard’s new leadership and its next phase of growth, including its innovation roadmap and why she wants MSPs to shift left. This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
Takeaways
Liongard is:
- Not looking to be acquired any time soon
- Taking product innovation off pause
- Staying true to channel while targeting new markets
- Expecting a move to user-based pricing
MSP Success: You have a new VP of community and channel, a new CRO, new CPO, new CFO. Founder Joe Alapat has moved from his most recent CTO/CPO position into the role of chief strategy officer. And you’ve been CEO just shy of two years. What’s the mission of this new leadership team?
Michelle Accardi: It’s to take advantage of the strengths that Liongard already had and help to bring that to market. There’s tremendous value in the visibility that Liongard gives to MSPs that enables them to mitigate risks, get better operational efficiency out of their businesses, and ultimately, generate revenue. All while focusing on—we call it “left of boom”—the things that help them avoid cybersecurity incidents from happening or to be better prepared should they happen. To have all the evidence and compliance data and reporting capabilities to make them more efficient and mitigate that risk.
MSP Success: A whole new leadership team typically signals a new phase of growth or a new direction.
Accardi: It’s absolutely a new phase of growth. Liongard has been, I’ll call it a darling of the MSP community, since it started. But I think it had taken a pause in some areas of innovation around the product set and focused a lot more on the operational efficiency side, the business, which is really important. But we felt the opportunity around enabling AI insights into the platform as well as cybersecurity were going to be critical. So bringing the talent to bear that has that experience and that has done it before.
MSP Success: What’s Joe Alapat’s mission now as chief strategy officer?
Accardi: Joe really is able to help us as we go into new markets. We’re focusing very heavily with Joe’s talents in the systems integrator space, which enables us to unlock the enterprise market through those systems integrators. It keeps us true to the channel but enables us to grow into new markets.
MSP Success: No plans to go direct to enterprise sales?
Accardi: Not direct, no. We’re a very channel-focused company. We believe we can get to those enterprise customers through systems integrators and large MSSPs.
MSP Success: You’ve raised over $30 million in several rounds of financing. The company’s 10 years old. What’s the next leap?
Accardi: Our intention is to just continue to grow. We see Liongard as a platform that we’ll continue to build upon. Our focus is only on helping drive value for our partners. And we believe that we build the strongest company by doing that.
MSP Success: What’s on your product road map?
Accardi: First and foremost, starting where our MSPs need to start automating asset discovery and asset inventory, which is a cornerstone to essentially having an attack surface management capability. If you don’t know what’s in the asset inventory of your customers or of your MSP, you’re not going to be able to protect it. So the first step is really automating that.
The next step is enabling these MSPs to have really great insights and reporting around that asset inventory, showing them what’s changing in configuration state that can cause risk, and putting that into an 18-month audit log of all those changes. And being able to do that across the tech stack.
There’s some platforms that only focus on the cloud or only focus on the network or on the endpoints. Liongard is able to do all of this across all of these different aspects of the tech stack. And then we’re able to add AI insights into that. And that’s really a big piece of our road map in 2025 as well as being able to put the power of those insights into the hands of these MSPs, to determine how they want to remediate and monitor whatever they find. It puts the power to them and gives a way to prioritize forward.
MSP Success: What are your plans for your partner program?
Accardi: First is to reinvigorate our Partner Advisory Council. Liongard is a phenomenal platform, but we think it’s important to focus where our partners feel like they get the most value. We can do that best by listening to our partners.
We haven’t had a structured partner program in that we don’t see a certain tier as platinum, gold, silver. We’ve treated our partners as partners, regardless of size. That being said, we do have a lot of new talent on the team. So we could take a different look at that in the future. But we pride ourselves on treating everyone with great customer service, not just because they’ve spent a certain amount of money with us.
MSP Success: What is Liongard’s value proposition for MSPs, and how is what you offer different from, say, IT Glue or Auvik?
Accardi: First, we believe in what we call the 10X partner ecosystem. We try to get more value out of everything in your tech stack, so we give visibility across that tech stack. So we don’t just monitor Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace or AWS or Azure. Liongard does all of that. We don’t just do monitoring of endpoints like an RMM; we connect into an RMM, we connect into an IT Glue. We make all those solutions better because we’re pulling in all that information, giving the customer and the partner a full view of their IT asset inventory. And then we’re able to show them where they have vulnerabilities and risk. Then they can leverage tools like the RMM, like RPA, alongside Liongard, to remediate and become more operationally efficient.
MSP Success: There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry. Do you ever picture yourself being acquired by an RMM/PSA platform vendor?
Accardi: We constantly market alongside [these companies] because we make their solutions better. We’re not looking to be acquired. We’re looking to grow our business organically. Our focus is [driving] value for MSPs. The rest will come when it’s the right timing, but ultimately we’re not looking for an acquisition any time soon.
MSP Success: Pricing, the cost of goods, and affordability for MSPs were topics in the spotlight a lot this past year. Is Lionguard thinking about pricing and pricing strategies?
Accardi: We absolutely are thinking about pricing. I think midyear you’ll see us probably move to user-based pricing … to help MSPs as they move to monetize Liongard more and make it very easy to be able to do that within their bundled packages.
MSP Success: Will your month-to-month option continue?
Accardi: Yep. We’re all about flexibility and being able to help our partners how they need to be helped. The way our month to month tends to work is that someone will come on for two or three months. Then we’ll give them a better pricing advantage if they move to an annual contract after three months. But we’re happy to serve them however they like.
MSP Success: You have over 25 years of experience in the software industry, most recently as CEO of Logically, a national MPS. There are very few female CEOs in the channel. What unique perspective and experience do you bring to Liongard?
Accardi: I’m a highly empathetic leader, one who does a good job of listening to my partners, to my team, but still has a point of view and a vision for the company. I liken it to being a mom, right? I have six kids: three step kids and three adopted children. I have a vision for my family, but my kids don’t always think the same way. It’s about … providing guidance, and at the same time, knowing when I have to lay down a law. Others may not like that analogy, but for me, it’s the truth of my life
So I’ve leaned into that, being able to listen, being able to set aside ego and just do the right thing for the people in the company and put customers first … I think women who are able to lean into their way of making people comfortable with sharing and getting new ideas and bringing more people into the fold, that’s what makes us successful in the in the market. And it’s why companies should look to have more women leaders.
MSP Success: What’s the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for both Liongard and its MSP partners this year?
Accardi: The biggest challenge and opportunity for both Liongard and for MSP Partners is, how do you raise revenue? It’s the hardest thing that a company does. And how do you do that while you’re mitigating risk, because there’s a lot of risk out there. … For us at Liongard, it’s not being shy about the fact that our partners need what we have. They don’t have a good way today to do asset discovery and asset inventory and to show what’s changing in configuration state that could cause cyber risk. So we have to be very confident going out and saying this to customers and partners who may not realize they have the problem [and] that there is a solution. They have to think differently about not just focusing on right of boom but shifting left.
For MSPs, it’s not being afraid to go to your customer with a new offering to stay ahead of risk, but to understand that you’re actually providing value and that you can charge money for these things. Oftentimes MSPs just want to put things in their tech stack and eat that cost. You need to be able to educate your customers about the risks that are out there and show them that they can be protected, and that you’re entitled to get compensated for the work you’re doing in that area.
