SolarWinds

SolarWinds, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a company that offers software for managing networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure. The company also has sales and product development offices in several other countries. As of the end of 2020, SolarWinds has around 300,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies.

SolarWinds is mostly known for Orion Platform, a scalable infrastructure monitoring and management platform designed to simplify IT administration for on-premises, hybrid, and software-as-a-service environments in a single pane of glass. It is used by about 33,000 public and private sector customers.

SolarWinds was established in 1999 in Oklahoma. Co-founded by Donald Yonce, a former Walmart executive and his brother David Yonce. The company’s first products, Trace Route and Ping Sweep were released in 1998. A few years later, SolarWinds its first web-based network performance monitoring tool in 2001.

The company has raised funds from Austin Ventures, Bain Capital, and Insight Venture Partners in 2007. Two years later, the company completed an IPO of $112.5 million. In the 2010s SolarWinds was named as the “Best Small Company in America, citing high-functioning products for low costs and impressive company growth” by Forbes and also ranked 10 on Forbes’ list of fastest-growing tech companies.

During its journey, the company also acquired various tech companies. In 2007 the company opened its European sales office in Ireland shortly after acquiring Neon Software and ipMonitor. After its IPO in 2009, the company also acquired New Zealand–based software maker Kiwi Enterprises. In 2011, the company acquired virtualization management company, Hyper9, network security company, TriGeo and the following year acquired patch management software provider EminentWare and RhinoSoft.

Between 2013 and 2020, SolarWinds acquired Boulder, database performance management company Confio Software, web monitoring company Pingdom, metrics and monitoring company Librato, log management service Papertrail, Capzure Technology, a remote monitoring software company LogicNow, an email security company SpamExperts, a log management and analytics company Loggly, threat monitoring and management software Trusted MEtrics, a service desk and IT asset management provider Samanage, a database performance monitor tool VividCortex, and a database performance monitoring provider SentryOne.