Almost exactly 20 years after the journey first began, I’m delighted to share that NetMotion has officially been acquired by Absolute Software, meaning we will be embarking upon an exciting new chapter in our company history. Far too much has happened in the past two decades for me to even attempt to cover it all in a single post, but I can speak to my experiences since I arrived five years ago and share why I believe this announcement presents such a bright future for NetMotion.
NetMotion has always been a company focused on improving the user experience. When our CTO & Founder Joe Savarese first set out to build what would become the foundation of our platform today, it was to address some of the new and emerging problems with an increasingly mobile workforce. That team, all the way back in 2001, realized that the performance of networks and the reliability of connectivity would become crucial to the future of how work got done, and time has shown just how accurate that vision was. Securing distributed workforces has grown into one of the most important priorities of the CIO today, with employees now able to work from anywhere at any time.
I’m proud that we’ve been a small but significant part of that worldwide transition, with early innovations like persistent connectivity and video optimization helping build our reputation in the secure access market – a technology segment in which you’ll find us in almost every corner today. Well over three quarters of first responders in North America rely on our technology every day, as well as huge swathes of the global legal, financial, aviation, utilities, healthcare, energy, government and manufacturing industries. We’ve not stopped developing new ideas either. More recently, NetMotion was among the very first to combine VPN functionality with the urgently important concept of zero trust – a philosophy recently championed by the Biden administration. Adapting our business to not just reflect changing working practices, but to lead them, has been a core part of our DNA and something we have worked hard to continue.
It’s this determined focus on both the latest thinking in security and on the employee experience that I discovered we share with the team at Absolute. When first meeting Christy Wyatt, CEO and President at Absolute Software, it quickly became clear that both companies possess a similar set of core attributes. From a product perspective, the concept of resilience shines brightly across both platforms – the idea of combining technologies to create self-healing networks and endpoints is an extremely powerful one. There’s also the recognition that cybersecurity is evolving, with zero trust playing an increasingly important role in securing the often fragmented and rapidly-shifting enterprise. Significantly, customers choose our software because of the vast array of data they generate, providing visibility into a corner of the IT/security stack that has traditionally been a blind spot. It’s for these reasons and countless more that bringing together the best of both product suites is a genuinely exciting thought, offering both sets of customers the chance to secure their workforce from top to bottom (the network, the applications and the devices) no matter where they choose to work – in a way that actively improves the user experience.
Combining two organizations is a big task, however, and complementary technologies alone would not be enough to fill me with conviction that this was the right move for our company. That’s why it was so important to me that any change to our business would be alongside an organization that we could grow with, in a collaborative and effective way. It’s truly remarkable how much NetMotion and Absolute have in common. Firstly, we each have headquarters in the Pacific Northwest, albeit on different sides of the border. We also both have long legacies of supporting remote working, with large, dispersed teams around the planet – coincidentally, our Reading offices in the UK happen to be a short walk from one another. On a more cultural note, I’ve always placed a high value on open, honest and encouraging work environments and everything I’ve seen from the team at Absolute fills me with optimism that this will be a home where those values will continue to be a priority.
We will no doubt be spending the coming weeks and months getting to know each other even better, figuring out the smartest ways to offer solutions that will benefit our customers; something we’ve always held in the highest regard at NetMotion. You can see that reflected in our world-class NPS of 91, or explore why that is that case in our review scores at G2 or on Gartner Peer Insights.
That part of NetMotion will never change, and I hope you will join me in celebrating what promises to be among the most exciting and ambitious eras in the NetMotion story.
