Consolidation within the SharePoint community

For those who have not yet read the announcement, the big news this morning is that Metalogix has acquired Axceler. This is a really big deal. Not only does the combined revenue make use bigger than any of our competitors, we also have 4 products that lead their categories: ControlPoint for governance and administration, StoragePoint for BLOB storage as well as backup, Content Matrix for migration from any version of SharePoint (and other platforms) to SharePoint 2013 or Office365, and Replicator for…well, replication.

What this means for existing customers: all existing support agreements will be honored, of course, but now it becomes easier to get access to all of these industry-leading platforms.

What this means for partners: because our companies really only overlapped in one area, we share quite a few partners around the globe. Every partner will be contacted with FAQs around the acquisition, and more details on what the combined partner program will look like going forward. As with our customers, this change gives our partners more options for their customers.

What this means for Axceler: some of you may be aware that we have been building governance tools that provide a federated view of the social activities across SharePoint, Yammer, as well as other social platforms. Any products having to do with SharePoint go over to Metalogix, while the new ViewPoint platform and the products that focus on non-SharePoint platforms will stay with a to-be-named new company. Metalogix and this new company will continue to partner together on this social collaboration governance platform.

What this means for me, personally: I will continue to provide thought-leadership, participate vigorously within the SharePoint community, and influence (badger, if necessary) the product management and engineering teams to help shape the direction of our roadmap. I’ll also continue to work closely with sales and our partner and alliance teams in any way I can. So…no real change from what I am doing today, except that they’ll probably want me to learn about all of these new products. What a hassle.

And of course, the full schedule in front of me doesn’t somehow magically lighten. It gets uglier, in fact, with all of these new meetings with my new team layered on top of the existing meetings. Here’s what is coming in the next two weeks:

• Thursday I’ll be hosting a webinar with Salient6’s Joel Oleson (@joeloleson) talking about the NSA security breach (had a chat today with Jeffrey Schwartz at Redmond Magazine on the topic, in fact) and how to quickly secure your permissions and reset your governance policies. You can register for the webinar here).
• I’m also in the midst of writing a whitepaper with Rightpoint’s Jeff Willinger (@jwillie), and an interesting article on Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with Atrion’s Jason Himmelstein (@sharepointlhorn).
• And of course, next week I board a flight heading to South Africa for to participate in SharePoint Saturday events in Cape Town and Durban, with about a dozen partner and customer activities in between. Plus, I’m going to have the whole shark cage experience. It’s a bucket list item.

Like I said – full schedule.

On a personal note, this acquisition is something that I had been trying to encourage in the background for quite some time, so I’m very happy so finally see this happen. While I’m sad to see some great friends stay behind and create a new company, I’m energized by the opportunity in front of us now. I’ve always had a good rapport with the Metalogix field teams, and am genuinely looking forward to working more closely with people like Cam Wallin (who drops into the PSSPUG every once in a while), Matt Maunder (who I generally see all over the EU), Steven Marsh (who will be joining me at the MPSC on Microsoft’s Redmond campus very soon), and Trevor Hellebuyck (who I first met in 2009 but he doesn’t remember), as well as the extended team.

I’ve always tried to offer myself up to the community as a soundboard for questions or issues, and plan to continue this with Metalogix – so please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, feedback, or suggestions. Change is always hard, and it takes time to move into a new role, but don’t let that deter you from getting in touch and letting me know what is working, and where we can improve. If I’m not the right person to help you, I’ll figure out who is. In my mind, evangelism is not just about the technology, but also to provide a communication channel between company and community.

For the time being, you can still reach me at cbuck@axceler.com. It’ll take a few days for operations to kick in, but my new email will eventually be cbuck@metalogix.com

Don’t be a stranger.