IT and cloud service management vendor Kaseya will announce the acquisition of a security vendor “in about four week's time”, the company's CEO Fred Voccola announced to a select group of journalists in San Francisco this week.
The company completed four major acquisitions last year to bolster its technology delivery and support offerings to managed service providers and IT departments. These included Unitrends, Spanning Cloud Apps, RapidFire Tools and IT Glue, and for 2018, the Dublin-headquartered and US-active vendor reported annual bookings turnover of $250m.
While the company already provides security and data backup services to its customers, it wants to expand its offering in this area to the SMEs and enterprises it serves. Voccola made Kaseya's plans public on the IT Press Tour across Silicon Valley, attended by journalists from the UK (including IT Europa), France, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.
Voccola said: “We will be announcing a security acquisition in about four week's time to add to our previous and recently completed acquisitions.”
He said he expected the rapidly growing and privately owned company to go for an initial public offering (IPO) “within 18 months”.
The company's busiest markets in EMEA are in the UK & Ireland and Benelux, followed by Germany and France, and to deliver better cloud support in France, Voccola said the firm was planning to open a new data centre in the country. This would be number 16 in the company's global data centre footprint.
He also said the firm planned to add 80 staff at its Dublin headquarters to help cope with the needs of the firm's expanding operations, along with a further 30 across its field offices. Kaseya rival ConnectWise was recently acquired by investment firm Thomas Bravo, and Voccola said “disruption” from that change would be to Kaseya's advantage.
He said: “Thomas Bravo is not an expansive company – they make money, they don't grow – they're already cutting staff there [at ConnectWise, he claimed] and we will be happy to hire the good ones.”
On the ConnectWise acquisition, he added: “Once these types of acquisitions take place, everything is up in the air. ConnectWise will be destroyed by this, particularly in Europe, they are a US-focused company, as American as they come, Thomas Bravo will not regard Europe as a priority.”
Whether Voccola's predictions about ConnectWise come to anything is anyone's guess, but his company is undoubtedly expanding.
