CARY — Samanage, an IT service desk services company based in Cary, has agreed to be acquired by SolarWinds, an IT management software company based in Austin, Texas, for $350 million. The deal beefs up Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds for competition with rival ServiceNow.

Interestingly, Samanage has been backed by Salesforce which is a ServiceNow rival.

“Samanage is a Salesforce partner and has received investment from Salesforce Ventures,” Credit Suisse analyst Brad Zelnick said in a report to clients, according to Investors Business Daily. “Furthermore, solutions like Samanage Service Desk are built natively atop the Salesforce Service Cloud, delivering a lightning-ready service experience.”

The deal comes just five months after Samanage closed on a $30 million investment Series D round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. In all, Samanage has raised $74 million from investors, according to Crunchbase.

Samanage

SolarWinds plans to fund the transaction primarily with its existing cash balance. The transaction is expected to close before the end of June 2019. The deal was announced earlier this month.

In the past seven years, Samanage has built a product guided by a customer-centricity that aligns well with SolarWinds’ mission of serving the technology professional community. The company launched in 2007 and has some 150 employees.

SolarWinds plans to add the Samanage products to its IT Operations Management portfolio beginning in April 2019. The company said the net value of the deal is $329 million.

“We are excited about the opportunity to bring our products together with the reach and strength of SolarWinds to enable IT organizations in companies of all sizes to achieve better business outcomes,” said Samanage CEO Doron Gordon in a statement.

Whether SolarWinds will take on ServiceNow directly, however, remains to be seen.

RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg said SolarWinds and ServiceNow target different customers, according to IBD.

“While in theory Samanage is in a market similar to ServiceNow’s, we believe Samanage is more of a midmarket vendor,” he said in a report.

Samanage offers incident management, problem management and an employee service portal. In addition to its Cary office, Samanage has offices in San Francisco, Australia, the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Israel.

SolarWinds’ products provide the power to monitor and manage the performance of IT.

“For 20 years, SolarWinds has been committed to making IT look easy by arming technology pros with the powerful tools they need to solve today’s IT management challenges,” said SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson. “We do this by responding to well-understood, everyday problems based on input and feedback from our customers and the IT professionals that we serve.”

According to the International Data Corp., IT service management represents a $6 billion market today and is forecasted to reach over $8.5 billion by 2023.

Mid-market and smaller businesses are underserved in the space, as existing offerings tend to focus on complex enterprise solutions that require dedicated staff and expensive professional services engagements.

This story is based on information in part from the North Carolina Business News Wire, a service of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism