SolarWinds MSP Buys Email Security Provider To Build Up Its Threat Intelligence Muscle

SolarWinds MSP has made its first-ever acquisition, purchasing an email security provider with services for email archiving and both incoming and outgoing spam and virus filtering.

The Durham, N.C.-based IT service management provider said the offering from Amsterdam, Netherlands-based SpamExperts can be delivered either on-premise or in the cloud, and will augment the existing SolarWinds MSP Mail offering.

"We really liked the nature of their SaaS-based model," Greg Lissy, SolarWinds MSP vice president of product management, told CRN. "We're genuinely very excited about that."

[RELATED: SolarWinds Buys LogicNow To Create MSP Solutions Powerhouse]

Although SolarWinds MSP has mail antivirus capabilities today, Lissy said the acquisition will provide more robust detection capabilities thanks to the SpamExperts' rich threat intelligence engine that it is continuously updating and the more than 10 million secure domains they currently house.

SpamExperts has provided SaaS-based mail protection and mail archiving services for best-in-class MSPs, internet service providers, telecom agents, and other IT service providers since its 2005 founding. The 50-person company also has offices in Bucharest, Romania.

SolarWinds MSP said SpamExperts has a reliable user interface and is easy to set up. SpamExperts was built using responsive design, Lissy said, enabling IT professionals to react quickly to events since the application can be utilized effectively on devices of various sizes.

The offering will help MSPs enhance reliability and security, SolarWinds MSP said, and can be delivered in 16 languages with easy private-branded options. SolarWinds MSP hasn't decided how the SpamExperts offering will be priced, Lissy said, or if the SpamExperts brand will be retained going forward.

The SpamExperts offering will primarily be resold by MSPs to their end users as either a standalone product or as part of an integrated package, Lissy said. The company plans to integrate SpamExperts into SolarWinds MSP Mail over the next 30 days, Lissy said.

The existing SolarWinds MSP mail antivirus offering has primarily been adopted by small and mid-sized businesses, Lissy said. SolarWinds MSP wants to continue driving adoption in the SMB space after SpamExperts is integrated, Lissy said, but will also look for opportunities to expand its reach to larger customers.

SpamExperts has doubled in size nearly every year since 2008, according to the company's website, and was recognized as one of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in both 2013 and 2014, according to Deloitte Technology and Main Software.

The privately-owned company services clients in 85 countries. SolarWinds MSP's increasing footprint in EMEA led the company to SpamExperts, Lissy said, and both companies today very much have a global focus. Both of SpamExperts' co-founders – CEO Sam Renkema and CTO Dreas van Donselaar – plan to join SolarWinds MSP, Lissy said.

The acquisition is SolarWinds MSP's first since being formed in June 2016 from the combination of SolarWinds N-Able and LogicNow. The combined company services some 20,000 MSPs globally, managing more than five million endpoints and one million mailboxes.

SolarWinds MSP also recently rolled out a data backup offering that enables MSPs to protect their SMB clients against ransomware in a cost-effective manner, channel development and enablement manager Nadia Karatsoreos told CRN earlier this month.

The new offering costs just $3 per workstation, is completely automated, and allows end users to recover their own data, Karatsoreos said. The product does two scans per day, and saves results from the past 28 days, according to Karatsoreos.