MSPs operate in a challenging and competitive marketplace. Small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers increasingly view the core IT infrastructure support services MSPs have long provided as commodities. At the same time, competitors are growing larger and more sophisticated as industry consolidation continues. Private equity investments have created more than 80 MSP platforms that are aggressively pursuing add-on acquisition opportunities.

As a business, we talk a lot about automation as one of the key ways to drive efficiency and growth within an individual MSP. By automating the response to and remediation of some of the more common IT issues customers face, technicians are freed up to spend more time dealing with bigger issues. Ultimately, this means the business is able to handle more customers without having to invest in growing its technician base.

When I started at Puppet three years ago, I saw a company with a tremendous customer base, an active open source community, an incredible reputation, products that solved some of the hardest problems in the operations space, and a passionate team that had deep values and was purpose-driven, both of which are at my core as a leader.

We have some exciting news. Today I’m thrilled to welcome a new member to the Auvik family. The MetaGeek team are experts in wireless and through their 15+ year history, MetaGeek has led the way in creating tools to help network administrators and wireless engineers build, monitor, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks. At Auvik, we have an ambitious and aggressive roadmap to deliver a remarkable technology management experience.

Today we are pleased to announce that CircleCI has acquired Ponicode, a Paris-based AI engine for analyzing source code, with the goal to help developers produce better code in their local development environment. Ponicode caught our attention with their dedicated focus to helping developers handle their least favorite tasks — the toil surrounding writing code — such as authoring tests, commenting code, analyzing code quality, and more.

I’m excited to announce that today, PagerDuty is taking our automation capabilities to new scale and scope as we enter into a definitive agreement to acquire Catalytic. With their technology and talented team we accelerate the delivery of enterprise-wide process automation that manages no-code workflows across the business, broadly applicable to any workflow, for any employee.

Over the past few years, we’ve been seeing large-scale consolidation taking place in our marketplace, with private equity firms and margin-based companies, such as telcos and traditional IT consulting businesses, investing heavily in MSPs.