N-able Partner Summit: Five Trends Worth Watching

nable partner summit 2010

1. The Theme: N-able hopes to show attendees how to achieve 100 percent IT coverage with their customers. That’s a tall order. We’ll be watching to see how N-able intends to help partners make that a reality.

2. Heavy Hitters: I’m not positive, but I believe Rackspace, Google and Microsoft will be on hand to discuss their various cloud computing partner initiatives. It should be a healthy discussion; I can’t recall of another conference where the trio agreed to sit on a panel together to help educate MSPs.

3. Expanded Executive Suite: During previous N-able Partner Summits, CEO Garbutt and VPs Mike Cullen and Derik Belair led most of the major strategic company discussions. But this time around, we’ll be watching and asking about COO JP Jauvin‘s impact at the company. After consulting with N-able for quite some time, Jauvin joined the company in June 2010.

4. Mid-Market Moves: As you may recall, N-able routes mid-market sales leads to partners. We’ve spoken with a few solutions providers that have sold N-able’s software into mid-size enterprises. No doubt, Garbutt will try to accelerate the mid-market channel strategy during the summit.

5. More Freemiums?: At the 2009 conference, Garbutt unveiled a freemium endpoint security strategy. The effort allowed N-able partners to leverage free endpoint security licenses as a means to attract new customers. By September 2010, N-able was back with a freemium backup strategy, through a partnership with CA Inc. Where is Garbutt taking the freemium strategy next? We’ll be watching and listening for clues.

If you’d like to potentially meet at the N-able Partner Summit, I’m attending on Thursday and Friday. Post a comment below or send email to Joe [at] NineLivesMediaInc [dot] com.

Sign up for MSPmentor’s Weekly Enewsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. And follow us via RSS,Facebook, Identi.ca; and Twitter. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.