N-able Adds Antispam Offering

A deal between MSP platform vendor N-able Technologies and messaging management vendor Postini aims to give N-able partners an integrated antispam offering for their managed services customers.

Beginning in March, N-able partners will have access to Postini antispam technology in the form of N-able’s SpamXIT Online, said Bill Stewart, vice president of marketing at N-able, Ottawa.

“A lot of antispam tools rely on filters. Once all the e-mail is received, it is filtered for spam, and that uses a lot of resources just to store those unwanted e-mails,” Stewart said. “But with SpamXIT, the spam is filtered online, so the spam never touches the customer’s server.”

Dennis Walsh, president of Patriot Networks, a Mendon, Mass., solution provider, said, “Wrapping it all into one solution to provide antispam and other services to customers is what we like about [SpamXIT].” It is a sophisticated solution that will solve the messaging clutter of Patriot Networks’ small-business customers, he said.

Adding an antispam component to N-able’s arsenal of MSP tools—which include network monitoring, patch management, storage backup and disaster recovery, security monitoring and more—will mean “a nice bit of additional revenue” for MSPs that sell SpamXIT to their customers, Stewart said.

N-able partners can, for example, purchase the antispam service from N-able for about $2.50 per e-mail account, and mark up the service to $5 or $6 per account. The cost of the service decreases as the number of seats increases, he said.

SpamXIT comes with advanced content filtering, a Web-based management console and tools that permit MSPs to create e-mail policies for inbound and outbound messages according to group or individual use, Stewart said.

Walsh said that because Patriot Networks caters primarily to small businesses that often are not running a server or are running a server but without a heavy messaging application such as Microsoft Exchange, he could have chosen a less expensive MSP platform than N-able. However, the amount of guidance N-able has provided Patriot Networks in reshaping the business from a project-based model to a managed services model based on recurring revenue has been worth the added cost, he said.