SolarWinds Inc.

Company type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: SWI Russell 1000 Index component
Industry	Software
Genre	Network monitoring
Founded	1999; 25 years ago (1999) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
Founders	Donald Yonce David Yonce
Headquarters	Austin, Texas , U.S.
Key people	Kevin Thompson (CEO, 2010 - 2020-12-07),[1] Sudhakar Ramakrishna (CEO, beginning 2021-01-04)[1]
Revenue	US$938.5 million (2019)[2]
Number of employees	c. 3,200[3] (2020)
Website	solarwinds.com

SolarWinds Inc. is an American company that develops software for businesses to help manage their networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure. It is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with sales and product development offices in a number of locations in the United States and several other countries.^[4] The company was publicly traded from May 2009 until the end of 2015, and again from October 2018. It has also acquired a number of other companies, some of which it still operates under their original names, including Pingdom, Papertrail and Loggly.^[5] It had about 300,000 customers as of December 2020, including nearly all Fortune 500 companies and numerous federal agencies.^[6][7]

A SolarWinds product, Orion, used by about 33,000 public and private sector customers, was the focus of a large-scale hack disclosed in December 2020, allegedly perpetrated by Russian intelligence. The attack persisted undetected for months in 2020 and investigations into the breadth and depth of compromised systems were continuing.^[8]

History

SolarWinds began in 1999 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, co-founded by Donald Yonce (a former executive at Walmart) and his brother David Yonce.^{[9][10][11][12]} SolarWinds released its first products, Trace Route and Ping Sweep, earlier in March 1998 and released its first web-based network performance monitoring application in November 2001.^[13] According to Michael Bennett, who became the chief executive officer in 2006,^[14] the name SolarWinds was chosen by an early employee and the company has nothing to do with solar or wind power.^[15] In 2006, the company moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas,^[10] where about 300 of the company's total 450 employees were based as of 2011.^[9] The company was profitable from its founding through its IPO in 2009.^[16]

During 2007, SolarWinds raised funding from Austin Ventures, Bain Capital, and Insight Venture Partners.^[17][18] SolarWinds completed an initial public offering of US$112.5 million in May 2009,^[10] closing at higher prices after its initial day of trading.^[15] The IPO from SolarWinds was followed by another from OpenTable (an online restaurant-reservation service), which was perceived to break a dry spell during the Great Recession, when very few companies went public.^[19] Both Bain Capital and Insight Venture Partners backed the IPO and used the opportunity to sell some of their shares during the offering.^[16]

Analysts and company executives forecasted continued expansion post-IPO, including several acquisitions.^[20] In 2010, Bennett retired as CEO and was replaced by the company's former chief financial officer Kevin Thompson.^[10] In May 2013, SolarWinds announced plans to invest in an operations hub in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was named by Forbes as "Best Small Company in America, citing high-functioning products for low costs and impressive company growth." By 2013, SolarWinds employed about 900 people.^[21]

Acquisition by private equity technology investment firms Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo, LLC. was announced in late 2015,^[22][23] and by January 2016, SolarWinds was taken private in a $4.5 billion deal. At the time, the company had 1,770 employees worldwide with 510 based in Austin, and reported revenues of about half a billion dollars a year.^[24]

In November 2017, SolarWinds released AppOptics which integrates much of their software portfolio, including Librato and TraceView, into a single software-as-a-service package. AppOptics included compatibility with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.^[25]

In September 2018, SolarWinds filed for a public offering again, after three years of being owned by private equity firms.^[26] SolarWinds completed their public offering on October 19, 2018.^[27]

On 7 December 2020, CEO Kevin Thompson retired and will be replaced by Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of Pulse Secure, effective 4 January 2021.^[1][28][29]

Acquisitions

According to The Wall Street Journal, SolarWinds offers freely downloadable software to potential clients and then markets more advanced software to them by offering trial versions.^[30] Following the funding in 2007, SolarWinds acquired several companies including Neon Software and ipMonitor Corp. and opened a European sales office in Ireland.^[31]

During and after its IPO in 2009, SolarWinds acquired a number of other companies and products, including the acquisition of the New Zealand–based software maker Kiwi Enterprises, which was announced in January 2009.^[32]

SolarWinds acquired several companies in 2011 and was ranked number 10 on Forbes magazine's list of fastest-growing tech companies.^[33] In January 2011, it acquired Hyper9 Inc, an Austin-based virtualization management company with undisclosed terms.^[34] In July, SolarWinds completed the acquisition of the Idaho-based network security company TriGeo for $35 million.^[33][35] TriGeo's offices in Post Falls were added to the list of SolarWinds location which already included satellite offices in Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Tulsa, as well as operations in Australia, the Czech Republic, India, Ireland, and Singapore.^[36] In 2012 SolarWinds acquired the patch management software provider EminentWare,^[37] and RhinoSoft, adding the latter company's FTP Voyager product to SolarWinds' product suite.^[38]

In early 2013, SolarWinds acquired N-able Technologies, a cloud-based information technology services provider. The deal was reportedly valued $120 million in cash.^[39] In late 2013, it acquired the Boulder, Colorado–based database performance management company Confio Software. With the $103 million agreement, SolarWinds gained a sales office in London and Confio's main product, Ignite.^[40] Between 2014 and 2015, the company acquired the Swedish web-monitoring company Pingdom,^[41][42] the San Francisco–based metrics and monitoring company Librato (for $40 million),^[43] and the log management service Papertrail (for $41 million).^[44]

Between 2015 and 2020, SolarWinds acquired Librato (a monitoring company),^[45] Capzure Technology (an MSP Manager software to N-able which SolarWinds had previously acquired),^[46] LogicNow (a remote monitoring software company),^[47] SpamExperts (an email security company),^[48] Loggly (a log management and analytics company),^[5] Trusted Metrics (a provider of threat monitoring and management software),^[49] Samanage (a service desk and IT asset management provider),^[50] VividCortex (a database performance monitor),^[51] and SentryOne (a provider of database performance monitoring).^[52]

2020 supply chain attack

On December 13, 2020, The Washington Post reported that multiple government agencies were breached through SolarWinds's Orion software. The company stated in an SEC filing that fewer than 18,000 of its 33,000 Orion customers were affected, involving versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020.^[6] According to Microsoft, hackers acquired superuser access to SAML token-signing certificates. This SAML certificate was then used to forge new tokens to allow hackers trusted and highly privileged access to networks.^[53] The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued Emergency Directive 21-01 in response to the incident, advising all federal civilian agencies to disable Orion.^[54]

APT29, aka Cozy Bear, working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was reported to be behind the 2020 attack.^[55] Victims of this attack include the cybersecurity firm FireEye, the US Treasury Department, the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, as well as the US Department of Homeland Security.^[56][57] Prominent international SolarWinds customers investigating whether they were impacted include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Parliament, UK Government Communications Headquarters, the UK Ministry of Defence, the UK National Health Service (NHS), the UK Home Office, and AstraZeneca.^[58][59] FireEye reported the hackers inserted "malicious code into legitimate software updates for the Orion software that allow an attacker remote access into the victim's environment" and that they have found "indications of compromise dating back to the spring of 2020".^[60]

The attack used a backdoor in a SolarWinds library; when an update to SolarWinds occurred the malicious attack would go unnoticed due to the trusted certificate.^[61] In November 2019, a security researcher notified SolarWinds that their FTP server had a weak password of "solarwinds123", warning that "any hacker could upload malicious [files]" that would then be distributed to SolarWinds customers.^{[62][63][64][65]} In a 2019 blog post Greg W. Stuart from SolarWinds argued on corporate blog that open-source software is less secure than proprietary because "anyone can update the code" and "risk of downloading malicious code [with open-source] is much higher".^[66] The New York Times reported SolarWinds did not employ a chief information security officer and that employee passwords had been posted on GitHub in 2019.^[67]

SolarWinds's share price fell 25% in the days following the breach.^[68] Insiders at the company traded $280 million in stock after the attack was revealed internally but prior to it being announced to the public.^[69] A spokesperson said that those who sold the stock were not aware of the breach.^[1]

On 15 December 2020, SolarWinds reported the breach to the Securities and Exchange Commission.^[68] However, SolarWinds continued to distribute malware-infected updates, and did not immediately revoke the compromised digital certificate used to sign them.^[62][70][71]

On 16 December 2020, German IT news portal Heise.de reported that SolarWinds had for some time been encouraging customers to disable anti-malware tools before installing SolarWinds products.^[72][73]

On 17 December 2020, SolarWinds said they would revoke the compromised certificates by 21 December 2020.^[74]

References

External links

• Official website
• Business data for SolarWinds Inc.:
  • Google
  • SEC filings