Thrive Holdings-backed MSP rollup Shield Technology Partners is having a busy December.
The MSP this week named former Palanti CIO Jim Siders as CEO, acquired its eighth MSP since launching in June and disclosed two internal products to help IT providers serve their customers. The moves followed on the heels of OpenAI taking an ownership stake in Shield parent Thrive Holdings.
“AI is rewriting the economics of service delivery at the exact time IT service providers are rethinking how they operate," Siders said in Shield’s press release.
Shield CEO Jim Siders
Siders spent 13 years at Palantir, an AI and data analytics firm. He worked his way from an IT helpdesk engineer to CIO. During his six-plus years as CIO, he oversaw global IT operations, infrastructure, and business applications during a period of rapid growth where Palantir reached over $4 billion in annual revenue.
Shield Acquires Option One Technologies
Option One Technologies became Shield’s eighth MSP last week, joining ClearFuze, IronOrbit, OneNet Global, DelVal Technology Solutions, NetAscendent Solutions, SK Tech Group and BCS365 under the Shield umbrella.
Boston-based Option One provides a fully managed cloud and IT platform for the financial, biotech, and legal industries. It was founded in 2019 by CEO Stephen Kiley and president Jose Suazo Villar, who both came from hedge fund Highfields Capital Management.
AI Holds the Key
In partnership with Thrive Holdings and OpenAI, Shield is bringing together a cross-functional team of research and applied AI specialists working alongside product engineers, operators, and industry experts to integrate AI into the businesses it partners with. Sentinel and Spectre, Shield’s two internal products, are focused on allowing IT engineers to triage and automatically resolve repetitive customer tickets.
“With the rise of AI, many IT departments and IT leaders are wrestling with profound and basic questions again for the first time in a generation, like: what does it mean to make workers more productive and impactful? What role should technologists and engineers play in guiding forward progress for a business? How do we prove whether a bet has paid off?” Siders told the Wall Street Journal’s CIO newsletter. “These are existential questions for companies, and many IT leaders are finding their opinions on basic user enablement and productivity highly in demand again.”
Writing on LinkedIn, Omdia principal analyst Jessica Davis underscored the importance of Shield’s enterprise-grade AI capabilities.
“A key question is how effectively Shield translates enterprise-grade AI thinking into the realities of MSP service delivery,” Davis wrote. “Siders will need to lean on the leadership of Shield’s acquired MSPs to ensure AI implementations are grounded in MSP business realities and community norms. Over time, it will also be worth watching whether Shield remains firmly MSP-first or begins to broaden its scope.”