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SOUTH JORDAN — Provo tech startup LANDESK became billion-dollar tech company Ivanti in January after acquiring nine companies in the last five years, merging with HEAT Software and seeing the company double in the last twelve months.
Now headquartered in South Jordan, Ivanti recently made its tenth acquisition at the end of June.
Ivanti helps IT professionals address security threats, manage devices and optimize user experience with an all-inclusive software for everything IT.
“We help IT manage and secure the end user computing environment,” said Ivanti CEO Steve Daly. “What that means is, the things that you and I use to get our job done. Whether it’s the software, the hardware and everything (else).”
While Ivanti is now growing considerably at a rapid rate, the company’s pace hasn’t always been quite so breakneck.
Ivanti began as Provo tech startup LAN Systems in 1985 where it was soon acquired by Intel, forming the tech giant’s LANDESK division. In 2002, LANDESK Software became a standalone company headquartered in Salt Lake City.
It was again bought by tech company Avocent but soon split and became an independent business unit. In 2010, the company was bought by Thoma Bravo LLC and established as an independent company. LANDESK would then make it’s first acquisition in 2012 and go on to make seven more before again being bought by Clearlake Capital, a private investment firm.
It was then in January 2017 that Clearlake Capital merged LANDESK with HEAT Software and the once-Provo startup brought all their acquisitions under one brand to become Ivanti, now valued at over a billion dollars.
Since then, Ivanti has acquired two more companies: Concorde Solutions in March and, most recently, RES Software at the end of June.
“We took the opportunity to change the name because ... we had done seven acquisitions in four years, and so we had a number of different brands we had brought together, and it felt like the right time to bring all those together under one brand that really told the story,” Daly said.
“Essentially, over the last four to five years and over the last 12 months, we’ve doubled the size through both organic growth as well as acquisition. And that’s what’s driven the increase in valuation.”
Though LANDESK itself was formed nearly 40 years ago, the company has grown from 20 employees in 1985, to 800 in 2016, to almost 2,000 in 2017. With such quick growth comes some growing pains, which have become the company’s most challenging obstacle at the moment, Daly said.
“We’re not just throwing money at the growth, but the growth is (happening) in a profitable way so we can be here long term. And that’s created opportunity to allow us to grow at this phenomenal rate,” Daly said. “Right now, that’s the biggest challenge. Our employees are doing a fantastic job, but a lot of them are working themselves hard to keep up with the growth. That’s our biggest challenge.”
Ivanti is now a global company with 36 offices located in 23 countries, but the company draws from its Utah heritage, Daly said.
“We’re really proud of our Utah heritage. We believe that Utah is a great place to do business,” Daly said. “We feel like the state’s very well-run, there’s a work ethic, there’s stability, the government is really supportive of business here. We have access to real talent, and so part of our corporate culture is that we feel like we owe it to the state to give back.”
Ivanti employees receive volunteer time off to work in the schools and help with STEM education. Company employees created a coding class for the Jordan school district then trained the teachers. Now about 650 students are graduating in computer science per semester, Daly said. The company also created a class for girls to learn to code and have had several of the women engineers teach and mentor the girls.
Now, along with giving back to the community, Daly hopes Ivanti can focus on finding itself and discovering the company its meant to be.
“With a merger at the beginning of the year — and we did an acquisition in March — I think we’re going to take a breather and focus on integration for a little while,” Daly said.
