When the acquisition of IT Glue by Kaseya was announced in late 2018, company CEO Chris Day left the company, and no formal leadership replacement was named. Now Nadir Merchant, who had previously been VP of Engineering, is being formally announced as the new IT Glue General Manager.

A year ago, at the Phoenician Resort in Phoenix, Vancouver-based IT documentation provider IT Glue held their first global user conference, at a comparatively early stage of the company’s growth. The second annual user conference begins today, also at the Phoenician. Much has changed since a year ago, however.

To begin with, the event itself has been rebranded as GlueX – as last year’s GlueCon is also the name of a long-established developer conference. At this year’s event, IT Glue is also formally part of Kaseya. They were part of Kaseya at last year’s event as well, but very few people knew it. The company’s acquisition by Kaseya – which had taken place nearly two years earlier, and had been kept skilfully under wraps by the principals involved – was made public only late last year. Chris Day, who had been the face of the franchise at IT Glue as founder and CEO, left the company when the acquisition was announced, as it marked the two-year period he had committed to stay. At Glue X, Nadir Merchant, who has been with IT Glue since 2016 and was VP of Engineering before the acquisition, is being unveiled to the broader user community as the company’s new General Manager.

Merchant’s ascension to the GM role was announced internally two months ago, but was not made public beyond that. The company did not issue a press release or a blog post detailing the move.

“We had been talking about naming a GM for quite some time, but there was no specific event that led to the decision being taken,” Merchant told ChannelBuzz.

Merchant said that his role as General Manager is to define the product vision.

“I run all product management,” he said. “I still maintain responsibility for engineering, and have also taken over marketing.” Holly Pateman, VP of Marketing, reports to him.

Luis Giraldo, who had previously been VP of Product, now moves to VP of Strategy.

“Luis is an MSP, with a very deep understanding of what it’s like to be an IT person,” Merchant said. “His role now is really focused on understanding what the MSP’s world view is, and to drive that business. He goes to events and talks to that community.”

Merchant in turn reports to Paul Farr, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Kaseya.

Merchant emphasized that IT Glue has continued to post the same strong momentum as part of Kaseya that it had enjoyed before the acquisition. Kaseya has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy over the last year and a half, bringing in backup vendors Unitrends and Spanning, and security providers Rapidfire Tools and ID Agent. All of those acquisitions were followed by arms-length management which allowed the acquired companies to maintain their business relationships with non-Kaseya MSPs, and that has been the case here as well.

“The momentum has been exciting, and we have added over a thousand new partners,” Merchant said. “We are still fairly independent at Kaseya, and the roadmap is totally independent of Kaseya. Partners understand that we aren’t going to be making any changes that will hurt their ability to use any tools they like which are outside the Kaseya ecosystem.”

The GlueX event continues tomorrow, when details of the IT Glue product road map will also be announced.