News
N-able Attempts Own Stimulus Program
Canadian RMM vendor hopes to seed SMB market with new "freemium" approach.
- By Scott Bekker
- January 18, 2010
Taking a page from the government playbook, remote monitoring and management (RMM) vendor N-able Technologies Inc. is throwing its own stimulus program at the managed services provider (MSP) market.
The company in January finished the rollout of what it bills as a $75-million stimulus to help its existing and prospective partners seed the market with a free basic version of its RMM software and a free security add-on, an approach the company is calling "freemium."
"We're making a major, major investment in the partners," Gavin Garbutt, N-able's president and CEO, said. The $75 million covers the cost to Ottawa, Canada-based N-able of distributing licenses of third-party security software and some marketing expenses, but not the development of the free, basic version of the company's flagship N-Central RMM software.
"We're making a major, major investment in the partners."
-- Gavin Garbutt, President and CEO, N-able Technologies Inc.
Garbutt's reason for the investment is his sense that, while only an estimated 10 percent of devices in the small to midsize business (SMB) market currently have RMM software deployed, the segment is poised for big growth.
"My belief is we're about to go back into some unbelievable times for IT service providers, especially for MSPs. People have not been refreshing their stuff. As the economy starts picking up and SMBs start spending again, whoever owns the data owns the customer," Garbutt said.
To help N-able MSP partners own that data, N-able created a free Essential version as part of the development of the recent N-Central 7.0 release. Paid licenses are called N-Central Professional licenses. N-Able describes Essential as providing RMM capabilities for non-critical devices such as asset management, monitoring and terminal services. Professional licenses add device control, remote support and tactical operation reporting.
The third-party security software licenses, an OEM deal with Panda Security, are called N-Central Endpoint Security Manager and include anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-malware, personal firewall and host intrusion protection.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.