SolarWinds Corporation is an American company that develops software for businesses to help manage their networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure.

The attack persisted undetected for months in 2020, and additional details about the breadth and depth of compromised systems continued to surface after the initial disclosure.

Together, the name reflects the company's goal of providing efficient and powerful IT management software that brings solutions to businesses in a dynamic and impactful way.

[17] The IPO from SolarWinds was followed by another from OpenTable (an online restaurant-reservation service), which was perceived to break a dry spell during the Great Recession, when very few companies went public.

[20] Acquisition by private equity technology investment firms Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo, LLC.

At the time, the company had 1,770 employees worldwide with 510 based in Austin, and reported revenues of about half a billion dollars a year.

[23] In November 2017, SolarWinds released AppOptics which integrates much of their software portfolio, including Librato and TraceView, into a single software-as-a-service package.

[1][27][28] On January 8, 2021, SolarWinds hired former CISA director Chris Krebs to help the company work through the recent cyber attack.

[30] In February 2025, the company announced[31] that it would be acquired by private equity firm Turn/River Capital for $4.4 billion[32]; the deal received approval from Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake, SolarWinds' majority shareholders with a combined 65% of the outstanding voting securities.

[35] Following the funding in 2007, SolarWinds acquired several companies including Neon Software and ipMonitor Corp. and opened a European sales office in Ireland.

[36] During and after its IPO in 2009, SolarWinds acquired a number of other companies and products, including the acquisition of the New Zealand–based software maker Kiwi Enterprises, which was announced in January 2009.

[58] The next day, the company stated in an SEC filing that fewer than 18,000 of its 33,000 Orion customers were affected, involving certain hotfixes of versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020.

[73][74][75] The New York Times reported SolarWinds did not employ a chief information security officer and that employee passwords had been posted on GitHub in 2019.

[85][86] On March 1, 2021, SolarWinds CEO, Sudhakar Ramakrishna, blamed a company intern for using an insecure password ("solarwinds123") on their update server.

[87][88] More than the intern using a weak password, experts noted that the main issue this fact highlights is the poor security culture the company has.

Senator Ron Wyden questioned why the US Government spent so much money on Microsoft software without the company warning it of this hacking technique.

[93] SUPERNOVA comprises a very small number of changes to the Orion source code, implementing a web shell that acts as a remote access tool.

[101] In January 2021, a class action lawsuit was filed against SolarWinds in relation to its security failures and subsequent fall in share price.

[102][103] SolarWinds attempted to have this case dismissed; in March 2022, a judge ruled that the class action lawsuit could move forward.