SolarWinds Inc. is an American company that develops software for businesses to help manage their networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure. SolarWinds is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with sales and product development offices in a number of locations in the United States and several other countries around the world. The company was publicly traded from May 2009 until the end of 2015, and again from October 2018. It has also acquired a number of companies, some of which it still operates under their original brand names including Pingdom, Papertrail, and Loggly.
History
SolarWinds was officially founded in 1999 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had maintained profitability since its founding. The company was co-founded by Donald Yonce and his brother David Yonce. SolarWinds released its first products, Trace Route and Ping Sweep, earlier in March 1998 and released its first web-based network performance monitoring application in November 2001. According to Michael Bennett, who became the chief executive officer in 2006, the name SolarWinds was chosen by an early employee and that the company has nothing to do with solar or wind power. In 2006, the company moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, where about 300 of the company's total 450 employees were based as of 2011. During 2007, SolarWinds raised funding from Austin Ventures, Bain Capital, and Insight Venture Partners. SolarWinds completed an initial public offering of $112.5 million in May 2009, closing at higher prices after its initial day of trading. The IPO from SolarWinds was followed by another from OpenTable, which was perceived to break a "dry spell" in which very few companies went public. Both Bain Capital and Insight Venture Partners backed the IPO and used the opportunity to sell some of their shares during the offering. Analysts and company executives forecasted continued expansion post-IPO, including several acquisitions. In 2010, Bennett retired from his position as CEO and was replaced by the company's former chief financial officer Kevin Thompson. In May 2013, SolarWinds announced plans to invest in an operations hub in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was named by Forbes as "Best Small Company in America, citing high-functioning products for low costs and impressive company growth." By 2013, SolarWinds was employing about 900 people. In October 2015, the company disclosed that it was in talks with a then-unnamed party interested in acquiring the company and making SolarWinds a privately held company again. An acquisition by the private equity technology investment firmsSilver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo, LLC. was announced in late 2015, and by January 2016, SolarWinds was taken into private ownership in a $4.5 billion deal. As of the sale, the company employed 1,770 people worldwide of which 510 were based in Austin and reported revenues of about half a billion dollars a year. In November 2017, SolarWinds released AppOptics which integrates much of the SolarWinds acquired software portfolio, including Librato and TraceView, into a single software-as-a-service package. AppOptics included compatibility with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In September 2018, SolarWinds filed for an IPO again, after three years of being owned by private equity firms. SolarWinds completed their IPO on October 19, 2018. SolarWinds reportedly updated its Network Performance Monitor product in December 2018 with enhancements for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure.
Acquisitions
According to The Wall Street Journal, SolarWinds offers freely downloadable software to potential clients and then markets more advanced software to them by offering trial versions. Following the funding in 2007, SolarWinds acquired several companies including Neon Software and ipMonitor Corp. and opened a European sales office in Ireland. During and after its IPO in 2009, SolarWinds acquired a number of other companies and products, including the acquisition of the New Zealand-based software maker Kiwi Enterprises, which was announced in January 2009. SolarWinds acquired several companies in 2011 and was ranked No. 10 on Forbes Magazine's list of fastest-growing tech companies. In January 2011, it acquired Hyper9 Inc, an Austin-based virtualization management company with undisclosed terms. In July, SolarWinds completed the acquisition of the Idaho-based network security company TriGeo for $35 million. TriGeo's offices in Post Falls were added to the list of SolarWinds location which already included satellite offices in Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Tulsa, as well as operations in Australia, the Czech Republic, India, Ireland, and Singapore. In early 2012, only about a month after acquiring Dameware, SolarWinds acquired the patch management software provider EminentWare. In December, SolarWinds acquired RhinoSoft, adding the company's product FTP Voyager to SolarWinds suite of tools and services. In May 2013, SolarWinds acquired N-able Technologies, a cloud-based information technology services provider. The deal was reportedly valued $120 million in cash. In October, it acquired the Boulder, Colorado-based database performance management company Confio Software. With the $103 million agreement, SolarWinds gained a sales office in London and Confio's main product, Ignite. Between 2014 and 2015, the company acquired the Swedish web-monitoring company Pingdom, the San Francisco-based metrics and monitoring company Librato, and the log management service Papertrail. During 2015, SolarWinds announced its acquisition of Librato, and Capzure Technology. In June 2016, SolarWinds acquired LogicNow, a rival remote monitoring software company. A new subsidiary SolarWinds MSP was formed by merging LogicNow and N-able Technologies. The company announced that the subsidiary will be led by LogicNow's former CEO Walter Scott with a new title of executive vice president. Between 2017 and 2019, SolarWinds acquired five companies:
