Current LANDESK CEO Steve Daly will become CEO of the new company – as yet unnamed. HEAT CEO John Ferron becomes the Executive Chairman of the new company’s Board of Directors.
LANDESK CEO Steve Daly, who will lead the as yet unnamed company Clearlake Capital Group is forming by acquiring LANDESK and merging it with HEAT.
LANDESK, which has been owned by Thoma Bravo since 2010, has been sold to Clearlake Capital Group, L.P. Clearlake’s plan is to merge LANDESK with HEAT, which Clearlake already owns. LANDESK CEO Steve Daly will be the new company’s CEO. John Ferron, a Clearlake Operating Advisor and the current CEO of HEAT, will serve as Executive Chairman of the company’s Board of Directors. The transaction is expected to close this month.
The new company will be headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT. Whether it will retain the LANDESK branding is not clear at this point. In a press release announcing the transaction, Clearlake indicated that the new corporate name will be announced at a later date.
This deal, following LANDESK’s 2016 acquisition of AppSense, continues LANDESK’s focus on developing a Unified Endpoint Management Strategy which will expand their Total Addressable Market. LANDESK’s user management solution, before that acquisition, was highlighted by its strong security features, including patching, security suite, and endpoint protection. AppSense complemented this with their privilege management and access control capabilities, as well as virtual capabilities that LANDESK did not have. Since the deal, LANDESK and Appsense have continued to release separately branded products, although the integration of the technology remains an ongoing process.
Clearlake says that HEAT’s Cloud-based Service Management (CSM) and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) software solutions, along with its SaaS platform will also be complementary to LANDESK’s product portfolio. They say the combination will provide additional geographic reach and vertical depth, and will enable the company to better serve IT organizations with solutions to manage and secure end user environments.
What exactly this will mean for the large channels of the companies impacted is not that clear. When LANDESK acquired Appsense, relatively few partners worked with both companies. ChannelBuzz has reached out to attempt to secure a channel-focused followup, and expects to be able to provide this in due course.
“This is an exciting day for LANDESK,” said Steve Daly, LANDESK’s CEO, in a statement. “We are thrilled to work with Clearlake in this next phase of our growth trajectory, as they bring significant endpoint security software domain expertise and cloud experience that will be critical to continue to build our platform organically and through acquisition,” said Steve Daly, CEO of LANDESK. “We are grateful for the partnership with Thoma Bravo over the years and are excited about this new chapter of growth for our business, particularly the addition of HEAT to our platform. HEAT’s products align well with our mission to help our customers build modern, user-centered IT organizations and will provide additional expertise and capabilities as we accelerate our investments in the cloud.”
