CEO: Security, Go-to-Market Are Next for Continuum
Redmond Channel Partner magazine caught up with Continuum CEO Michael George on Thursday, a day after the managed services provider tools vendor landed an acquisition by Thoma Bravo LLC. (See our story Wednesday for details.) What follows are excerpts from the conversation.
On whether and how long George will be staying on in the CEO role he's held since September 2011:
"I'm a part owner and I'm an investor. By sound mind and reason, I'd be a fool to leave prematurely [laughs]. This is a company that we've been building now for the last five years to get to this foundational point. As long as I'm the right CEO for the company, I intend to stay on."
On whether the investment puts Continuum in better position to make acquisitions, which Thoma Bravo officials mentioned could be on the horizon:
"For sure, but I think that's more a function of the size and scale of our company. When Summit Partners acquired us [in 2011] we were about 400 employees. We've been profitable. We only had 43 employees in the U.S. at the time. Today we're 1,400 employees. We have 400 employees in the U.S. We have offices [now] in the U.K., Australia, Manila and Mumbai. We have a very distributed engineering environment. We've always had capacity to invest, grow and build, or buy. We have more capacity just because we have size and scale. I have a full-time M&A guy on my team, Steve Cardillo, and he has a team of people [looking for companies to acquire, researching them and doing due diligence]."
On what Continuum's MSP partners should expect:
"There are two things that you should see likely change for us, that we'll lean into more aggressively. One is acquisitions -- products and services. [The other is] investing in our go-to-market to make more and better resources available to [our partners] so they can sell and grow and be more profitable. Our revenue model is utilization-based. We're very focused on helping our partners go get more customers."
On the technology areas that Continuum will look to make investments in the near future:
"I think the watchword is security for us. It's a very big problem, and it's getting bigger. If you think about what we do, the unique value proposition from Continuum is the fact that we have this vertically integrated solutions model. We have the NOC, the help desk. Soon we're going to have a security operations center that we're going to take to market that's going to enable people to have massive scale and have our MSPs have massive scale and capacity. Security is the category that no one technology solves for. You have to defend, which technology can do, but then you have to detect, and that requires people. There's over 1,000 people in the service delivery side of [our] business. That completes the whole equation -- RMM, security, then backup and recovery. Those are the three pillars of the IT service waterfront, what I affectionately call the holy trinity of the IT service waterfront."
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 15, 2017