N-able Kicks Off Partner Summit

By Gennifer Biggs, security, storage, and managed services editor

The N-able Partner Summit, held in Scottsdale, AZ, kicked off with an opening reception on Wednesday night, Oct. 20. The event showcased not only N-able's newest technology, but also its vendor partners in the managed services space, including CA, Kutenda, Autotask, Intronis, VaultLogix, Axcient, Rackspace and more.

VP of Sales for N-able, Mike Cullen, opened the event by presenting N-able's plan for 2011. He outlines N-able's goal of answering many of the pending concerns from its partner base, many culled from a survey of that community. "We are really focusing on taking the time to answer questions from our partners, and help them resolve these issues," says Cullen. Among the top concerns: new customer acquisition, the cloud, hiring and retaining top talent, and automation.

To address the first concern, N-able is continuing to offer and enhance its essentials licensing program, which allows partners to roll out free licenses of certain N-able products as a way to gather information from customer networks that might help further sales initiatives with that customer, but also to whet the appetite of customers that might otherwise just be using the partner for reactive IT work. (Read more about this initiative …) "We want them to use essentials to seed their marketplace, and then slowly evolve those casual customers into proactive, and ultimately, managed customers," says Cullen.

Cullen also answered the question of cloud, explaining that N-able is working to inform its partners about developing a strategy for handling cloud solutions and has developed an alliance of vetted vendor partners that N-able feels are reliable and deeply committed to the channel. "Many of our partners are simply overwhelmed with cloud and all the conversations about it," says Cullen. "We want them to develop a strategy to handle this technology." N-able has staked out the hybrid model as the best strategy for many of its partners, and is offering its support through an alliance of vendor and MSP partners, including Amicus, CA, CP Greeley, DRS, eEYE, IronMountain, RackSpace, Xilocore, and more.