Mergers and Acquisitions, MSP

IT Glue Acquires Monkey Box, Accelerates MSP Documentation Push

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Chris Day, founder, Top Down Ventures
Chris Day

IT Glue has acquired Monkey Box, the companies have confirmed. Monkey Box CEO Luis Giraldo joins IT Glue as part of the deal. Both businesses develop documentation platforms, so this essentially is a small tuck-in deal for IT Glue.

In a blog post describing the deal, IT Glue said: "One of the major initiatives for IT Glue this year is the development of a full Product team, and Giraldo’s arrival will help with that. The Product team will work closely with our developers and our partners in order to bring about a better IT Glue experience, increasing our responsiveness and charting an aggressive course for future development initiatives."

The buyout comes amid shifts in the MSP documentation marketplace. Just yesterday, Passportal expanded from its MSP password management roots to introduce documentation and document management capabilities for MSPs. IT Glue, meanwhile, has password management capabilities built into its document management system.

IT Glue and Passportal: Similar but Different?

Still, IT Glue doesn't necessarily see Passportal as a head-on competitor. "I saw that they were launching something, but it doesn't look like it competes based on our early assessment of the capabilities," IT Glue CEO Chris Day tells ChannelE2E. "Our development team is now over 20 people dedicated to our platform, and IT Glue has nearly doubled as a company since we last spoke to 66 employees. We expect to be about 110 employees by the end of calendar 2017, and we are having a blast!"

IT Glue also isn't planning any integrations with Passportal. "We've discussed integrating but it's not a big priority for us as we do have powerful password management capabilities built-in to IT Glue and thousands of MSPs using (and loving) those features," Day asserts. "We will continue to build upon those features so that our partners can take advantage."

Day has aggressive expansion plans for IT Glue. I believe the company had about 2,000 MSPs as customers by the end of 2016, up from about 1,000 MSPs in December 2015. Back in September 2016, Day told me IT Glue’s business plan calls for the company to engage about 4,000 MSPs by the close of 2017 and 8,000 by 2018’s conclusion.

Complete M&A Coverage: Track all VAR, MSP and CSP mergers and acquisitions by visiting the ChannelE2E Milestones section daily. Also, check out ChannelE2E’s Top 100 Mergers & Acquisitions across the IT channel, 2017 edition.

Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.