SolarWinds' goal is to make the best software available for IT professionals. You guys are constantly under pressure to fix outages, evolve existing infrastructure, build new infrastructure, and migrate old infrastructure all while constantly keeping up to date with emerging technologies. Meanwhile, many companies still see their IT department as a cost center rather than a fundamental business enabler and just want to find a way to cut costs. Until that changes, we expect that IT shops will always be pressed to the extreme for time.
That's why we put a lot of focus on ease of use and price point. To us, those are a big part of what "best" is. Now, if in one hand we claim to try to make our software as easy to use as possible and in the other hand we make money when customers can't figure out our software and have to come to us for professional services, is that a good thing?
Sometimes we don't get ease of use perfectly right and for some companies, having an outside consultant come in to help with monitoring just makes sense. That's where our partners like Loop1 come in.
You mentioned other software vendors offering professional services in house. Different vendors take different paths on this and I'm not saying any of them are incorrect. At SolarWinds though, we focus on ease of use.