Thoughts from Carrie Wheeler, President of Liquid Web Family of Brands

There’s A LOT going on here at Liquid Web and our Family of Brands. I’m excited to share just a few updates with our community of employees, partners, customers, and investors. Last month, I stepped into a new position, and I now have the pleasure and honor of heading up our Liquid Web Family of Brands, which includes our Liquid Web, Nexcess, StellarWP brands, and our Modern Tribe agency teams.

In my prior role as EVP and Chief Operating Officer for Liquid Web and Nexcess, I led our Managed Hosting, Managed Applications, and Cloud Development & Platform teams. And now, I welcome our StellarWP brands and Modern Tribe into my purview as we more closely align these great brands within our set of products that represent what we call our “Commerce Cloud” Business. 

We refer to our grouping of world-class brands as “Commerce Cloud” because our business is focused on providing the best cloud-based hosting, application, and software products to small and midsize businesses that make money online. We’re passionate about serving these companies whose online business is their business — and the creators building online sites and stores.

In other very exciting news, late last year, our prior investors Madison Dearborn Partners, in a very normal investment cycle, sold their investment to One Equity Partners. We could not be more excited to have One Equity Partners (OEP), a global private equity firm with ~$10 billion in assets within the industrial, healthcare, and technology sectors in North America and Europe investing in us. They have significant experience investing in technology, and we are thrilled to add their leadership and expertise to our team. 

Oftentimes, these changes can be met with skepticism and concern that the company will change in ways that don’t benefit the communities they serve — and sometimes, that skepticism is warranted. Not here. As a management team, we had input into who our next partner would be — and I am quite energized and excited about the next phase of Liquid Web’s opportunities, particularly because OEP will be investing in our hosting, applications, and software product lines to expand our presence in the market. They are interested in our growth, not just squeezing cash out of a truly great asset. It’s why I’m here, why I’m excited, and why we’re working hard to put together new and exciting product roadmaps across our portfolio with an emphasis on better hosting options, tooling, and capabilities.

With the enthusiastic backing of OEP, you will see our brands continue to grow globally. You can be assured that our customer strategy for our Liquid Web family of brands (Liquid Web, Nexcess, StellarWP) is more focused than ever — empowering our small businesses and their creators to make money online.  We’ll do this by expanding our product lines into new hosting areas and capabilities, adding performance, security, and reliability features into our existing product lines, and improving the usability of all our products — from hosting to applications to software.

You may have seen that we continue to expand our VMware offering, recently announcing the expansion of our VCDA capabilities into our Phoenix data center and refreshing our VPS product line. We’ve also just launched two products built to deliver security and peace of mind for our customers. For our Managed Applications customers, the Performance Shield add-on powered by Cloudflare provides best-in-class CDN, DDoS, and WAF protection with many additional features available for customization of your needs. And for WordPress customers experiencing problems with malware infections, we’ve launched our Malware Remediation Program, which can take the pain out of getting your site up and running again.

Hosting for our solutions remains a cornerstone of our value proposition, and we have work lined up to expand and extend our offerings in exciting ways. Refreshed Dedicated Server offerings, feature-rich VPS products, and extension of our VMware IaaS and PaaS solutions are core to how we provide rock-solid hosting for our customers. We are also in the process of adding numerous security and add-on capabilities to our product sets, as well as integrations to some leading platform technologies that our customers rely on more every day.

For those of you in our tremendous WordPress community, as it relates to our StellarWP Brands, I’ll be taking the reins from Joe Oesterling, who is moving on to pursue a new career path. Joe’s been my partner and friend for nearly 15 years, and I certainly hope to carry on his passion and focus for engaging in the community and serving our customers with the best products and services possible.

As I write this, I’m reflecting on WordCamp Europe and preparing for WordCamp US — events that always energize me by meeting with partners, friends, and, yes, even competitors. I’m always impressed with the organizers, the quality of the events, the keynotes, and the sessions. It is hard to describe what it is like to be surrounded by 2,000 of your closest WordPress friends — all professionals committed to this ecosystem that has changed the way sites and stores are built for so much of the world. It’s extraordinary to be able to attend in-person events of this caliber, which we may have taken for granted prior to Covid.

WordPress and our software solutions remain core to our growth plans. WordPress remains the dominant CMS, and we’ll continue to look for ways to attract SMBs and creators to our hosting infrastructure, our premium WordPress plugins, and/or our simplified SaaS solutions, such as LearnDash Cloud. We remain committed to our commerce cloud strategy of making it easier to build on WordPress.

We have a solid leadership team with years of hosting and software experience at the helm of our expansion efforts. And we have over 1,000 committed team members who help us serve our customers 24/7/365. I’m excited about this next evolution of our strategy to become the leader in cloud computing for small and midsize businesses. You have my assurance that our mission remains core to who we are and what you should expect.

As always, I would love to hear from our partners, customers, and community members. I can always be reached at carrie@liquidweb.com

Here’s to the future,

Carrie Wheeler

President, Liquid Web Family of Brands