News

LANDesk, Heat Software Combine To Form Ivanti

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• January 24, 2017

LANDesk and Heat Software have merged into a company called Ivanti that aims to provide a broad suite of cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solutions focused on endpoint configuration, security and reporting.

The combination of the two companies brings together Heat Software's SaaS-based ITSM, help desk and unified endpoint management tools with LANDesk, which is well-known for its patch management and security software. Heat Software parent Clearlake Capital, a private equity firm, earlier this month agreed to acquire LANDesk from Thomas Bravo. Terms weren't disclosed, though The Wall Street Journal reported the deal is valued at more than $1.1 billion. Ivanti on Monday announced that the deal has closed and disclosed its new name.

Heat Software is a SaaS-based provider of ITSM and endpoint configuration and control tools. LANDesk, for its part, has built on its patch management portfolio with the acquisitions of Shavlik from VMware in 2013 and Wavelink in 2012. Among Shavlik's offerings are security, reporting and management tools that include a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) module. Wavelink offers mobile device management (MDM) and modernization software. LANDesk's most recent acquisition of AppSense nearly a year ago gave it a popular provider of endpoint virtualization software.

Steve Daly, LANDesk's CEO, will lead Ivanti. The merger with Heat Software will accelerate LANDesk's ability to move from traditional endpoint management software to offering its products as SaaS-based tools, he said.

"At LANDesk, historically we've been slow to the cloud," Daly acknowledged during an interview following the announcement of the deal. "From a Heat perspective, what it brings to us at LANDesk is, first and foremost, their very robust cloud platform. First and foremost, that for us was the main strategic reason for this deal."

The combination of the two companies will also help Heat Software accelerate its goal of bringing on more channel partners, Daly said. Heat Software only started building out a partner program over the past year.

"Historically, they haven't done a lot of business through the channel," Daly said. "What we'll do is bring the two channel programs together. We are in the process of rationalizing those like we did with AppSense."

While AppSense had its own partner program when LANDesk acquired it in the middle of 2016, they were run separately and combined this month, according to Daly, who said a similar scenario is likely with the formation of Ivanti.

"We'll do the rationalization. We'll run the partner programs separately for a little while and then we'll merge them together," he said. "What we think for Heat partners, this is going to be a good thing because we've got a lot of the infrastructure that they were still investing in and trying to build out. If you are an Heat partner, it will accelerate your ability to go execute, and it also brings a much bigger war chest to bring to bear on solving these problems."

The Heat Software platform will enable the migration of LANDesk, Shavlik, Wavelink and AppSense under a common SaaS suite, Daly added.

"What it does open up, though, is MSP opportunities for us," he said. "The Heat cloud platform is a true cloud platform. It's a multi-tenant platform. So what that does for our MSP customers is [it is] much more cost-effective for them to support multiple partners. You're not spinning up an instance for every customer. So, for an MSP, we believe this will give them a much more cost-effective way to deliver managed services through the Heat platform over time."

Daly noted that Heat Software has invested extensively over the past several years on bringing its ITSM tools to the cloud, as well as offering a workflow engine that can manage endpoint lifecycle management. "That's really where the power is," he said.

Bringing together the two companies comes as the Microsoft Windows platform has more security and self-updating features, and the task of managing endpoints is now falling on both IT and security teams, Daly added.

"Because a lot of the management techniques are getting easier, the OS is building more and more management into the platform. It's really about how you secure that end user environment," Daly said. "This is particularly acute at the endpoints because the endpoint is such a dynamic environment, whereas the datacenter is pretty static and well-controlled. Our endpoints change every day as we download stuff or as we add content."

Going forward, Daly said he believes that the profile technology Ivanti uses for Windows 10 migrations and building support for mobile devices will become a key factor in delivering a so-called "digital workplace" because of the end user activity the platform gathers.

"If you lose your laptop and you need a new one, bang, you don't lose anything -- we just grab your personality that we've watched and stored."