The sweltering desert heat didn’t stop about 400 attendees from flocking to SolarWinds MSP‘s Empower MSP conference this week in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A major theme of the conference was the vendor’s increasing emphasis on providing cybersecurity to MSPs and their SMB customers.

John Pagliuca, SolarWinds MSP’s senior vice president, said not every MSP is cut out to become an MSSP, so a more layered approach is needed in terms of providing cybersecurity to MSPs. In response, the vendor unveiled its new Threat Monitoring Service Program. The new offering builds on SolarWinds Threat Monitor with outsourced security operations center (SOC) services delivered via SolarWinds Threat Monitoring Service Providers (TMSP), which so far include Falanx Group and Secuvant.

“We’re investing more in people and technology focused on customer experience,” Pagliuca said. “If we’re building and putting something out in the market and you don’t like it, we need to know.”

The vendor has 22,000 partners and customers, and serves 450,000 organizations globally.

“We’re seeing a lot of demand and we have great visibility into what our customers are doing and what their customers are doing,” Pagliuca said. “So we’re seeing device growth, an uptick in different types of adoption — in particular, a lot of security uptick and security adoption. And by all indicators, the channel seems to be pretty healthy.”