N-able CEO John Pagliuca says “transformation” is the company’s 2024 rallying cry, and he encourages managed services providers to take on that call as well. To achieve transformation—in their businesses, their service delivery, and their partnerships—he encourages MSPs to standardize, automate, and augment the parts of their services necessary to take advantage of opportunities and grow.
That’s the message he conveyed to close to 500 MSP partners in attendance at the opening day of the N-able Empower user conference at the Omni PGA Frisco Resort in Frisco, Texas, which is taking place this week.
“We identify identified three, maybe four, ‘durable truths’ for MSPs,” Pagliuca told the audience in a Q&A style keynote with Robert Wilburn, vice president of partner growth at N-able. These are the key tenants MSPs need to be successful. Those durable truths, he said, are efficiency, resilience, and partnership, plus (the fourth) interoperability, and everything N-able is doing is anchored with those truths.
To help its 25,000 MSP partners globally grow and succeed around those durable truths, Pagliuca urged MSPs to focus on three pillars: standardization, automation, and augmentation.
N-able Cloud Commander
Pagliuca also said N-able is intent on transforming their own platform “to give you the ability to monitor and manage both the physical world and the cloud digital assets.”
In keeping with that intention, N-able announced a new version of its Cloud Commander, a multitenant solution for the Microsoft Cloud that leverages the company’s 2022 acquisition of Spinpanel. In collaboration with Microsoft, Cloud Commander enables MSPs to manage, secure, standardize, and automate Microsoft 365 users, Azure resources, and Intune devices all from a single console, eliminating the need to manage multiple logins and portals. N-able also unveiled plans to add Windows 365 management capabilities in the near future.
In addition, N-able announced integrations with Rewst, to help MSPs automate complex workflows across multiple products and environments; and HaloPSA to streamline data and alert management. The integrations with HaloPSA and Rewst are currently available for N-central, with plans to include additional products in the future.” For the first time in the industry, there’ll be more of a bilateral or bidirectional data flow between an RMM and a PSA, making both that much more efficient,” Pagliuca said of the HaloPSA integration.
N-able touts this as another step in realizing its “Ecoverse” vision, an open ecosystem for connecting disparate tools for cloud and on premises resources.
This follows N-able’s recent expanded integration capabilities for endpoint detection and response (EDR) and Apple management capabilities across its RMM platforms, Microsoft 365 protection within the Cove disaster recovery offering, and more.
The announcements also come on the heels of N-able’s new managed detection and response (MDR) offering that became generally available in January.
The change in the conversation from cybersecurity to business resilience is “a huge tailwind in the industry,” Pagliuca said.
Change is also occurring in service delivery, as MSPs move up market via co-manage, co-partner, and hybrid business models, Pagliuca noted.
N-able research identifies a growing amount of co-partnering arrangements, particularly in the area of cybersecurity, he said. “That’s why we spent a good amount of time and invested and brought to you this N-able MDR offering to allow you to partner and augment and accelerate.”
By partnering, MSPs can go faster, he said.
“If you want to be really truly deliberate and transformative, please think about how you need to reallocate or change even some of your resources. You might need to be attracting a different type of technician, a different technical set of expertise. You may have to have a broader or different type of application background,” Pagliuca said. Pricing and packaging might need to change to when selling to IT professionals versus an SMB business owner. “So when you think about transforming [your] target market and the who [the buyer is] make sure you’re taking a 360 view; don’t be haphazard about it.”
The MSPs that are future-proofing their business are focused on the pillars of standardize, automate, augment, he said, “they’re transforming as part of their daily routine.”
He noted that N-able takes its responsibility as a partner very seriously. “Our mission is squarely rooted in this concept of enabling. And our mission is really to give you both the tools and technical know-how there to really meet your goal.”
