A Brightening Light in Infrastructure Software

solarwinds logoWhile SolarWinds (SWI) has nothing to do with solar energy, the company—a provider of networking and application performance management and visibility solutions—is a shining example of how a strategically sound acquisition strategy can add lots of value. Since 2011, SolarWinds has completed more than a dozen mainly moderately sized deals in a move to broaden its reach and expand its total addressable market beyond the core networking management segment.

When it comes to M&A, SolarWinds management has been disciplined and careful not to bite off more than it could chew at any one time. But any company in always-on acquisition mode faces increased execution risks, especially in terms of the sales channel.

It now looks like the M&A push at SolarWinds is finally getting dialed back, meaning the company can start to really concentrate on better integrating many of the features of its ever-expanding platform. And with a more robust portfolio of integrated products, sales reps will be able to push more lucrative bundled offerings.

The bullish case for SolarWinds shares, which rose nearly 32% last year after falling 27% in 2013, calls for the company going forward to focus more on improving execution and less on acquisitions.

Investors in 2013 questioned the company’s $120-million purchase of N-able Technologies, a provider of cloud-based infrastructure management solutions for managed service providers (MSPs), because of the transaction size and terms (SolarWinds used 44% of its cash at the time). But it turned out to be a savvy M&A move, as this unit in 2014 delivered revenue growth of 40%. The MSP channel provides remote monitoring and management services to a large customer base of small businesses (those with up to 200 employees), a market SolarWinds had no exposure to before this transaction.

One of the big positives to emerge from the recent deal making: SolarWinds is now better positioned to handle IT infrastructure management in both on-premise and cloud environments. While some technology tinkering still needs to be done “to really knit the vision completely together,” the company already has most of the pieces and parts in place, says CEO Kevin Thompson.

The SolarWinds platform is now able to quickly collect data from more than 100 sources, then correlate and analyze the data in order to provide insights into network and application performance.

A couple of smaller acquisitions have been well received by investors, including the purchase last June of Pingdom, a provider of cloud-based website monitoring and Web application management solutions. Many leading tech companies (including Microsoft, Twitter, eBay and Spotify) deploy Pingdom solutions to ensure top Web performance. The plan for 2015 is to increase Pingdom conversion rates, moving more of the 650,000 users on the free version over to the paid offering (there were about 24,000 paid users at the time of the acquisition).

With many organizations these days deploying a hybrid cloud model, the most recent SolarWinds purchase, a $40-million deal for Librato, provider of cloud monitoring solutions, makes a lot of sense. Librato helps SolarWinds bridge the gap between on-premise and cloud environments, providing visibility across both segments. Importantly, Librato is capable of watching workloads running in Heroku, Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Librato offers a subscription-based monitoring system used predominately by IT pros, operations teams and developers who write and run applications at scale. The goal is to turn the massive amounts of data produced by all of the applications, tools and services into actionable insights, and enable a quick resolution for any performance problems. With respect to its dashboard functionality, Librato effectively competes against solutions from recent hot IPO New Relic (NEWR). For 2015, the primary goal when it comes to Librato is to ramp subscription sales into the SolarWinds installed customer base.

After a strong performance in the third quarter (revenue gained 28% and topped the consensus estimate by 2.6%; EPS of 50 cents beat the consensus by seven cents), SolarWinds in Q4 reported revenue growth of 22% (currency headwinds sheared off 200 basis points of growth), driven by 28% growth in maintenance and subscription revenue (representing 62% of total revenue); license revenue (38% of total) advanced 14%. Operating margin remained strong, coming in at 44%, while EPS of 51 cents beat the consensus by four cents.

On the Q4 conference call, Thompson said the company was better positioned headed into this year than it was going into 2014 because of improved demand across the entire product portfolio. Even the company’s core networking management business is performing better than expected.

But it’s the new cloud-based offerings released this year that should really help drive top-line growth at SolarWinds. The company recently announced an enhancement to its Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) to improve the performance of business-critical applications hosted in the AWS Cloud (in addition to those hosted in on-premise and virtualized environments).

The performance of cloud-based apps is very dependent on database performance. Yet, most application performance management tools today only focus on application code, ignoring the database.

SolarWinds DPA provides IT management and development teams with performance-based visibility into their databases across all environments, including the cloud. The product continuously monitors all databases to identify performance issues that impact end-user response times; show historical performance trends and baselines; and correlate configuration and deployment changes with database response times.

SolarWinds DPA can now be used in conjunction with solutions from Librato, which have been seamlessly integrated with AWS to provide enhanced visibility and insights into applications hosted in the cloud.

For 2015, SolarWinds’ revenue guidance range of $513 million to $531 million represents growth of 20% to 24% year over year. The recent consensus revenue estimate of $521.2 million stands just below the midpoint of the guidance range, indicating analysts on average are a bit concerned that currency pressure this year might curtail growth a little more than generally expected (SolarWinds generates 28% of its revenue from international markets).

At a recent price of $50.25, SolarWinds shares trade at 25 times the 2015 consensus EPS estimate of $2.00 and 21 times the 2016 consensus of $2.37. At last year’s low in May, the shares had a forward P/E of just over 20; at current levels, the stock’s valuation looks a little extended. For now, I am keeping SolarWinds on my watch list.

 

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