A few years ago, I was meeting with venture capitalists and private equity firms about the future of k6, the open source performance testing tool that we created in 2016 and open sourced in 2017. After talking about the k6 product mission — to give modern engineering teams better tools to build reliable applications — one investor challenged us to create an even bigger vision for the company: What if we acquired a company to broaden the k6 story?
Building modern, cloud-native applications introduces new challenges to teams and organizations. As these systems grow and scale, struggles abound: inconsistent performance monitoring experiences across siloed tools, wasteful performance management practices with duplicated efforts, and mounting frustration from colleagues and customers. Surmounting these challenges requires multiple sources of data and truly unified observability.
Mergers and acquisitions are complex. So complex, in fact, that up to 90% fail. One of the biggest risks for M&A failure comes during technology integration. At this stage, enterprise security, compliance, and employee productivity can all be irreparably disrupted. IT needs to walk a fine line between staying on schedule and maintaining stability.
APIs are integral to the success of modern enterprises across a wide range of industries, such as finance, logistics, and manufacturing. They not only enable developers to build powerful business solutions by integrating with external applications, but also facilitate communication between internal services. This means that the ability to build reliable, highly-performant APIs—and govern their behavior and performance—is more important than ever.
With the continued focus in our space on the movement from MSP to MSSP, it’s crucial to remember that products alone don’t necessarily make you an MSSP. For smaller customers, although you might be able to provide a range of security solutions (like EDR and backup) and compliment these with an RMM to provide insight and control over end user devices, this is not enough to call yourself an MSSP.
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.
