N-able Road Trip Has Upgrade for Managed Services Providers
N-able Technologies has delivered its next-generation managed services platform, N-central 8.2, as either a cloud or on-premises solution for MSPs. At the same time, N-able executives are on the road hosting regional N-able Partner Summits that replace the company’s annual partner summit. These latest N-able efforts surface a few months after the software company received a private equity investment to drive growth.
During a conference call last week, N-able CEO Gavin Garbutt was his usual upbeat self. If you catch Garbutt in a downbeat mood it’s a surefire indicator that something is seriously wrong in the MSP market. I’ve yet to catch him in a gloom-and-doom mood.
N-able N-central 8.2: What’s New
Garbutt pointed to several key N-central 8.2 features designed to empower MSPs:
- Familiar capabilities like asset and warranty discovery and reporting, task automation, endpoint security and self-healing remain in place.
- DirectConnect, a remote control and management module. It was developed in conjunction with NTRglobal. N-able and NTRglobal have a longstanding business relationship.
- Another new capability involves a centralized backup and recovery solution powered by CA Technologies‘ ARCserve D2D offering. Here again, N-able is leveraging a longstanding business relationship with a software partner.
- Garbutt also spoke extensively about N-able’s MSP Technician Runbook, which provides MSPs with standards-based knowledge.
In terms of strategy, it’s clear that N-able remains keenly focused on its core managed services platform, plugging third-party software components into the system in a quest to give MSPs a single, centralized management dashboard (“single pane of glass”). In stark contrast, many other MSP software providers are branching out and pushing into neighboring markets like NOC (network operations center), help desk and PSA (professional services automation) software.
N-able Summits
Meanwhile, N-able has shifted its community strategy ever so slightly. Instead of hosting a large, multi-day conference toward the end of the year, N-able is on the road throughout 2012 hosting regional events across the globe. The strategy reminds me somewhat of Level Platforms, which has focused on road shows rather than an annual event for several years now.
It’s a safe bet MSPs will get a look at N-central 8.2 during N-able events set for multiple cities over the next few months.
On the one hand, I’ll miss the end-of-year N-able event because it always gave me the opportunity to do deep dives with Garbutt and the N-able executive team. Moreover, the N-able conference is where I met a bunch of great industry sources — folks like master IT CEO J. Michael Drake and CTO Gary Wiseman, and ClinicAnywhere (formerly ETG) CEO Mike Jones.
Still, N-able’s shift to regional events has plenty of upside — allowing N-able to engage year-round with MSPs worldwide, instead of asking hundreds of MSPs to gather once annually in a U.S. location.
If you attend one of the N-able events try to corner N-able VPs Mike Cullen and Derik Belair and ask them about their best road trips. Their stories rank right up there with Crosby and Hope.
