10. Thoma Bravo Acquires Continuum

Head count: 1,400 employees

Annual sales: Not disclosed

Purchase price: Not disclosed

Deal closed: June 14

Private equity giant Thoma Bravo purchased global IT management platform provider Continuum to boost organic growth and M&A activity in the SMB security space.

Boston-based Continuum is looking to build an end-to-end security offering tailored to small and midsized businesses, according to Continuum CEO Michael George. The offering will include perimeter and endpoint defense, firewall-level security, anomaly detection, the ability to isolate a problem to a particular user's system, and remediation through its existing tools, George said.

This is not Thoma Bravo's first foray into the IT service management space. The Chicago-based firm partnered with Silver Lake in October 2015 to purchase IT infrastructure management vendor SolarWinds, owner of SolarWinds N-Able (now SolarWinds MSP), and eight months later combined it with newly-acquired IT services management firm LogicNow.