Empower 2022: New RMM General Manager Wants N-able to Be a 'Better Partner'
N-able wants MSPs to win by giving them a competitive differentiation.
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John Pagliuca, N-able’s president and CEO, said his company is helping businesses impacted by Hurricane Ian via data protection.
“Historically, data protection in our Cove offering usually comes to the rescue, where we’re allowing folks to back up and recover their data, and [put] their data and active environment not somewhere that’s onsite,” he said. “So this is where I think we stand head and shoulders above some of the other folks that require an appliance that might be sitting or floating somewhere in an office or in rivers in Florida. So I think our Cove offering is a great way to make sure that the MSPs can be data resilient. MSPs need to have that business continuity plan and they need that continuity with their customers. And we hope to be part of that equation. So I think that’s probably the biggest offering that comes to mind.”
N-able is asking MSPs to go beyond basic Microsoft 365 reselling, security and data protection capabilities. The company plans to enhance Cove Data Protection and Cloud User Hub. In addition, it’s developing Cloud Asset Manager, an all-new solution.
N-able plans to add Microsoft Teams data protection capabilities, audit services and serverless cloud capabilities to Cove Data Protection. Also, additions to Cloud User Hub, which came from N-able’s acquisition of Spinpanel, will allow MSPs to manage and automate Microsoft Azure tenants, users and subscriptions, and more.
“Our Cove Data Protection allows MSPs to focus on other stuff,” Pagliuca said. “The name of the game is we’re here to help MSPs for their bottom line of being efficient at scale and then give them things that they can go and sell for their customers. Cove and Cloud User Hub have a tremendous amount of automation and technology that allows MSPs to focus on the more strategic stuff while the technology takes are of a bunch of things. Cove allows MSPs to not focus on staring at screens. MSPs are spending hours or weeks on onboarding SMEs with Microsoft 365 and it’s huge and labor intensive. Cloud User Hub allows MSPs to … take that down from weeks to minutes. It fits right into the crosshairs of what we’re trying to do.”
During his keynote, Pagliuca said more MSPs need to be pursuing enterprise customers. Cullen said there are a lot of opportunities with bigger companies.
“It’s a major movement in the industry where we have customers that are completely centered around what we would call midmarket opportunities,” Cullen said. “And sometimes it’s full managed services where it’s a complete outsource, but more often it’s an outtask. So if you look at Fortress, who walked through their offerings, many of them are a la carte. It may be managed patch or it may be managed endpoint detection and response (EDR) or managed SentinelOne. But we’re seeing a lot of companies moving upmarket and we see the internal IT departments outtasking components because they’re just simply not good at it. And they’re really important. An internal IT department doesn’t want to run patches. They want to do projects and the exciting stuff, and they take that mundane work and outsource it to companies like Fortress who make it a specialty. And we’re seeing a lot of that happening.”
Cullen said N-able polled its Super Elite MSP partners about whether they’re feeling the effects of an approaching recession, “and really there wasn’t any significant number.”
“If you try to compare this to 2008, 2008 was a wall,” he said. “We hit the wall, boom. We woke up one morning and the financial institutions were a mess. What I would say now is that we’re easing into something and we’re going to be able to ease out of it fairly quickly. I don’t think it’s going to be the same type of thing that we had in 2008. But 2008 offered a lot of opportunity to the space. lf you look at the standard midmarket company, their No. 2 expense item is IT. So when times are good, they don’t manage that line item. When times are slower, they will manage that line item. And I think there’s going to be opportunity in that as companies with internal IT departments go to cut costs a bit, and doing co-managed is a great example of how MSPs can get in there.”
The coming year will be all about N-able being a better partner, Cullen said [pictured with Pagliuca (left) and CSO Dave MacKinnon (right)].
“I think it’s it’s all about the partnership,” he said. “When we were with SolarWinds, we were held to a very high standard of profitability. And when we spun out, we really invested back into our partners. We spent a lot of money putting 100 people into customer success. And those people don’t carry quotas. They don’t write deals. Their reason for existence is to bring our partners value. So that was a big investment. We made a big investment in our development. And so as I look into next year, I think it’s continued down those routes being a better partner. And one of the things that keeps me up at night is how we can become a better partner. How can we support our customers? How can our customers be the the ones that win this industry? How can we give them competitive differentiation? How can we give them better levels of support so they can compete against their competitors? I think we’re a good partner now, but I aspire to be a better partner.”
During a partner press panel, a number of MSPs talked about the latest issues they’re facing and how they’re addressing them. One of the issues impacting all is the ongoing labor shortage.
Catherine Wendt is president of Syscon, an Alabama-based MSP. She said her company has been fighting the labor shortage for awhile and needed to make a big change to tackle the issue. The average stay on a job for a tech worker is 18 months.
“What we needed to do is keep people longer,” she said. “We did make the transition in the type of person we hired.”
Syscon hired someone specifically focused on hiring and finding the right people who would stay with the company longer.
“We’ve onboarded four people in the past six months and every one is a successful fit,” she said. “It required a different model and focus.”
Chris Soutar is vice president of Entre Computer Systems, an Illinois-based MSP. He said his company is finding a “lot of great young people.” The company is able to “mold them” so they feel like they’re a part of building something so they don’t want to leave.
During a partner press panel, a number of MSPs talked about the latest issues they’re facing and how they’re addressing them. One of the issues impacting all is the ongoing labor shortage.
Catherine Wendt is president of Syscon, an Alabama-based MSP. She said her company has been fighting the labor shortage for awhile and needed to make a big change to tackle the issue. The average stay on a job for a tech worker is 18 months.
“What we needed to do is keep people longer,” she said. “We did make the transition in the type of person we hired.”
Syscon hired someone specifically focused on hiring and finding the right people who would stay with the company longer.
“We’ve onboarded four people in the past six months and every one is a successful fit,” she said. “It required a different model and focus.”
Chris Soutar is vice president of Entre Computer Systems, an Illinois-based MSP. He said his company is finding a “lot of great young people.” The company is able to “mold them” so they feel like they’re a part of building something so they don’t want to leave.
N-ABLE EMPOWER 2022 — During day one of Empower 2022 by N-able, the company’s new general manager of RMM said his challenge for the company’s second year is how can it be a better partner.
Empower 2022 is the first live N-able conference. In July 2021, SolarWinds completed its spinoff of N-able, which is now an independent, publicly traded company.
Last week, N-able announced Mike Cullen has been named general manager of RMM. In his new role, Cullen takes responsibility for the strategic direction of N-able’s RMM platforms and complementary portfolio. He’ll also stay close to N-able’s Head Nerds, market development and customer success teams.
N-able’s Mike Cullen
“I had the perfect job, I was winding down,” Cullen said. “I was going to go down to three days a week, that sort of stuff. And then [CEO John Pagliuca] … tapped me on the shoulder to do this. I’ve been with N-able since 2001. What I liked about the job was the challenge of making N-able what it once was and making N-central the product that it is. So I agreed to come on board to do this for a period, just really for our partners and our employees. So the first thing I wanted to do is make N-central purpose-built for production. Having two products (N-central and N-sight) is actually great. But it’s also a deterrent when you’re going through the process. So when we first merged, we had a lot of trouble defining the product strategy. We wanted them both to be the same to do everything equally.”
On Cullen’s Agenda
The first thing Cullen wants to do is optimize the products for a segmented marketplace.
“The smaller-volume users have absolutely nothing in common with the large volume users,” he said. “Large-volume users want to do things at scale. They want to do advanced automation. They want to manage tens of thousands of devices at the same time where the smaller user wants to manage hundreds. So the first thing we did was to recognize the fact that we have 25,000 customers; 4,500 of them are using N-central and we’re optimizing N-central for the large customers. Two weeks ago we met with our largest MSPs for a two-day session of dialogue of us showing them technologies and getting their input on that, and getting their input on the direction and really getting to the point where our large customers are driving the product roadmap for and N-central. That’s probably the first and biggest thing that I’ve done since I took the job.”
Listening to MSPs is the only way you get a better product, Cullen said.
Message for Partners at N-able Empower
The message for partners at N-able Empower is the company wants its partners to win the MSP movement, Cullen said.
“There’s going to be a lot of consolidation,” he said. “I want the N-able partners to be the ones that win. In order to do that, we have to give them competitive differentiation. The easiest way to sell is when you have competitive differentiation. So if you look at the things that we’re talking about, we showed you the ability to monitor and manage the public cloud. We’re unique in that space.
“We’ll also show you the ability to monitor and manage Mac devices on par with Windows,” he continued. “And we’ll be the only MSP platform that can give our partners that. So when I look at the things that I want to get done, at the front end, I want our customers to be able to grow and acquire new customers. The only way we can do that is by giving them reliable product and competitive differentiation. We’ve … ticked both those boxes, and I think we have the most solid product road map we’ve had in seven years.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Day 1 of N-Able Empower.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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