N-able Technologies is the latest managed services software company to promote a 2011 road show. But the item that caught my attention has to do with the growing reach of N-able’s managed services partners. Specifically, N-able’s global MSP partner base now manages more than 40,000 SMBs — up from about 23,600 roughly a year ago. What drove the growth?
In some ways, I suspect N-able’s freemium software strategy helped MSPs to reach more customers. The freemium effort included free endpoint security tools and some storage offerings for N-able’s MSPs. The concept: Get MSPs speaking with customers about free or low-cost solutions, then upsell and cross-sell the SMBs on additional managed services.
Of course, freemium is only part of the N-able story. In recent months, N-able President and COO JP Jauvin has taken on day-to-day operations, working closely with CEO Gavin Garbutt and VP of Sales Mike Cullen, among other team members. Garbutt — ever the optimist — shares an upbeat outlook in a recent blog post. Eager to maintain the growth, N-able is launching a 2011 Global MSP Road Show. N-able isn’t the only company on the road. Level Platforms has also launched a major multi-city road show.
There seems to be plenty of optimism in the managed services market — including surprisingly strong business statements from companies like Axcient and Labtech Software.
Reality Check
Still, I want to be careful not to hype the MSP space. Thousands of resellers are still struggling to master the managed services business model. And some MSPs openly wonder how they will drive growth — especially as some SMB customers embrace cloud services directly from large technology companies.
All that said, anecdotal evidence looks good. And our fourth-annual MSPmentor 100 research report — set to be unveiled February 16 — will show some strong growth trends in the global managed services market.
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Posted In: Australia | EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) | Events | North America | On Premise | Remote Monitoring & Management Software | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: Axcient | Gavin Garbutt | JP Jauvin | LabTech Software | Level Platforms | Mike Cullen | MSP Global Road Show | N-able Technologies | Remote monitoring and management | RMM Software
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Interesting story. Congrats to N-able… pretty good team there behind the scenes working for success.
How will MSPs attract growth when faced with SMBs going to the big guys directly for cloud services? Offer better cloud services focused on addressing business problems, that’s how. Partner for success in the cloud – don’t go it alone and think you can build everything yourself. Then, then lead your customers to the cloud, rather than the other way around. Don’t forget, buying cloud services direct is every bit as confusing for the end user as buying hardware direct is. That is your opportunity to provide value add services.
Rob: To reinforce your point, it seems like more and more MSPs are opting to partner rather than build/buy their way into the cloud. Two years ago numerous readers seemed to be kicking around their own hosted Exchange and hosted SharePoint buildouts. Today: Not so much…
-jp
Hi Joe,
In follow up to your blog, below are the three primary drivers that fueled much of N-able’s MSP partner growth in 2010:
1. Our complete turn-key sales and marketing programs, as well as our sales and business coaching on how to achieve “100% IT Coverage” of all break/fix, reactive, proactive and managed customers. We also provide our MSP partners with very clear migration programs to help them up sell and cross sell to SMB and Midmarket customers from Reactive to Proactive to Managed Services. All of this is offered free to N-able’s MSP partners.
2. The advancements we’ve made to our N-central 7 hybrid platform provide our partners with a significant technology and customer service advantage.
3. As you indicated, our freemium strategy with N-central Essential, Managed Endpoint Security, and Remote Backup Manager continues to generate greater demand and service revenues for our MSP partners.
If interested, I would be more than happy to share additional insight on these strategies with you and your MSP readers.
Cheers,
Gavin Garbutt
CEO, N-able Technologies
ggarbutt@n-able.com
Gavin: Belated thanks for your additional thoughts.
-jp