Armed with cash and a new global channel program rolled out this spring, NinjaOne is “ready to take on any MSP of every size starting last year. And now, we just want to make it easier for them to move over to Ninja,” says Sal Sferlazza (pictured above), CEO and co-founder of NinjaOne.
Three announcements today are part of moving that strategy forward. The IT management platform company announced a new solution, NinjaOne Warranty Tracking, which it will offer free to all NinjaOne MSP customers, and is making NinjaOne Documentation free for any MSP partner for up to three users. NinjaOne also introduced white-glove professional services, designed to help new MSP partners migrate their tech stacks to NinjaOne without impacting their business.
Warranty Tracking, which NinjaOne developed internally, is an opportunity to add value for partners, Sferlazza says. “Most of our MSP partners, particularly large ones, don’t want to pay for this feature, but they have no alternative. One of the things that Ninja is good at is we have the discipline to know when to monetize or not. We feel like here is an opportunity … we’re actually going to save you guys money, and we’re not going monetize on this feature.”
He says Warranty Tracking is a logical extension of device management. “What’s the health of this device? How is it performing? Were there remediations I need to do? If I run a report for my customers, what’s the state of warranty? Those are up charges [for the MSP]. Or there could be security risks. Are there license compliance issues? It just makes sense to have that in a single-pane platform.”
Similarly, since NinjaOne has been steadily developing its documentation solution. Sferlazza says it now has the “equivalent capability of all the commercial vendors in a single pane.” And now, “the smaller shops that have three technicians or less can enjoy the platform for free [with] aggressive low-cost pricing above that watermark.”
He adds, “We’re going to continue to build free products that we think are easy and that should be part of the core platform.”
Make no mistake, though, NinjaOne is aggressively courting larger MSPs. The new white-glove service is designed “to support that transition as you move to Ninja, whether it’s scripts or workflows, we’re going to help carry the ball and move you into the Ninja platform and make that experience faster, more enjoyable.”
Growth Trajectory
Founded by Sferlazza and President and CFO Chris Matarese in 2013, NinjaOne has grown from 160 employees in 2020 to over 1,400 employees with close to 20,000 customers globally. The company does sell into IT departments, but Sferlazza says most of its business comes from MSPs.
In February, NinjaOne received a $231.5 million Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth. Frank Slootman, chairman and CEO of Snowflake; and Amit Agarwal, president of Datadog; among others also invested in the round. And ICONIQ Growth General Partner Roy Luo joined NinjaOne’s board of directors. According to NinjaOne, the company had a 70% ARR growth rate in 2023.
“We’re the quietest hypergrowth story probably in the market today,” Sferlazza says. But that quietness is about to end. “We already have some of the largest MSPs in the market using Ninja … and we want to tell the rest of them that there’s a clear path to adopt[ion] and to be successful for any scale of any MSP in the market.”
Focus On R&D
Today, NinjaOne’s platform comprises RMM for endpoint management and multi-tenant cloud-first backup. “Ninja wants to be on every endpoint,” Sferlazza says. “We recently released our MDM platform to continue to expand the heterogeneous devices that we support.”
The platform does not currently include a security stack. “Our approach has been twofold,” Sferlazza says. “Partner with world-class vendors like CrowdStrike and SentinelOne for things like security and stay where our DNA is on solving the hard problems around heterogeneous device[s] in the world.”
NinjaOne also integrates with the major PSA solutions. It works closely with HaloPSA, but Sferlazza says there are no current plans to make an acquisition in that area. However, he says, “Never say never … but our superpower is it’s all single stack, all single code base. The best and brightest minds at Ninja are all working on the same problem. It gives us a velocity that none of our competitors can match because we’re all on the same tech stack.”
Looking Ahead
NinjaOne plans to use the cash investment to accelerate R&D for its platform development and continue to invest in customer support. No surprise that AI is on the docket, too, but Sferlazza says, “we want to be thoughtful about it.”
He adds, “Our DNA is always to build great products and scale out the R&D team. The Ninja philosophy is overspending on R&D and overspending on support. … We actually want to move even faster.”
