The Microsoft ISV Market is Heating Up

Every year at Microsoft’s partner conference that takes place in July, the company always touts how for every dollar that the company makes, their partners make a multiple of that figure. The marketplace that exists to help customers migrate, manage, and utilize Microsoft 365 software and services is extensive and fiercely competitive.

Here at Petri, we work with many of these ISVs (independent software vendors) to help highlight or promote their solutions to our readers as we believe these vendors set a high-water mark for functionality, value, and service. And in the past few weeks, there have been two significant moves that are worth highlighting.

Announced today, AvePoint who you may recognize as Dux is a co-host on Enterprise Dish, announced that they are going public via a $2b merger. The company is merging with Apex Technology Acquisition Corporation which is a SPAC (explainer) that will take the company public under the symbol of AVPT.

After the merger closes, the combined company will be led by Dr. Tianyi Jiang, AvePoint’s co-founder and CEO, and AvePoint co-founder Kai Gong will serve as Executive Chairman. As of September 30th, the company reported 7 million cloud users.

In addition to the AvePoint news, Quadrotech announced about two weeks ago that they had been acquired Quest. Looking to bolster its management and migration solutions for Microsoft 365 users, Quadrotech’s NOVA platform will be integrated into Quest’s portfolio of solutions.

As more and more users move to Microsoft 365, the market for ISVs will continue to grow. Right now, there are more than 250 million subscribers to Microsoft 365 but the company had reported previously that there are about 1.5 billion Office users in total.

While not every single Office user will move to Microsoft 365, of the 1.25 billion who have yet to migrate, there is still significant growth ahead for Microsoft and its partners who are helping those users move to the SaaS platform.

And this is the reason we are starting to see big moves in the ISV space. As bigger players look to optimize their Microsoft 365 solutions, they are either buying up smaller vendors who specialize in this service (Quadrotech) or companies are simply growly quickly and looking to broaden their reach (AvePoint) as this market segment is far from mature.