Founded in 2000, it used to dabble in a number of areas, including security, storage and customer relationship management. About a year ago, it decided to focus solely on remote monitoring and management for MSPs.“We’ve really seen the market evolve significantly from the early days,” said Gavin Garbutt, CEO of the Ottawa firm. “This is really not about a technology play for these system integrators and VARs. The ones who just take the technology and don’t understand that they really have to change the business as they start delivering managed services inevitably fail.”
The company’s tools monitor, manage and optimize information technology and security, and include the Velocity System (a transformation framework) and Momentum System (a complete automation framework). It just released two new products, Remote Support Manager and Remote Environment Manager.
N-able is a channel-only company and does not sell direct to end-customers. It has 130 team members, more than 30 of whom are dedicated to post-sales support. “These people are not generating revenue for us,” said Garbutt. “They are there purely to help our customers have a better experience.”
Partners can buy a block of licences in a platform model, which they then sell to their customers as a service. N-able also introduced a “zero risk” software-as-a-service model where the system integrator or VAR can buy product on a monthly subscription basis, per customer, per month.
The company is focused on keeping partners ahead of the commoditization curve that it expects to happen at the basic remote monitoring and management level over the next couple of years, said Garbutt.
