N-able Technologies is adapting the old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" to try to win more financial services customers for its managed service provider partners.
The Ottawa-based service platform provider has joined the Independent Community Bankers of America, an organization comprised of nearly 5,000 banks and financial institutions in the U.S. The goal is to spread the managed services gospel to potential clients and then pass the leads on to MSPs, said Gavin Garbutt, CEO of N-able.
"Twenty-five percent of the [ICBA] members are actually customers of ours already. We view those numbers as only going to increase because of legislative requirements," Garbutt said. "Small banks have to offer the same level of compliance as large banks."
And it's not just financial institutions that N-able hopes to attract. N-able also recently joined Educause, a higher-education non-profit association, and is looking at associations or organizations in health care and other vertical markets ripe for IT growth, Garbutt said.
"We worked with our Elite partners to develop a reseller program so that partners can register opportunities. We're getting good success with that. We starting doing deliberate ads [targeting] mid-enterprise end users. That bore a lot more fruit. We're generating leads and bring partners into the sales process," Garbutt said. "We have a ton of partners in health care -- people focused on clinical practices and the IT support specializing in the health care sector. Some are dental, some are chiropractics, some are hospitals. Some are IP-enabled medical device manufacturers. It's pretty interesting what we're seeing."
Garbutt said it's not unusual for IT companies to join trade associations, though the vendors have to show their value to be accepted in the group.
"It's not like I can say, 'I'm a VAR' and want to join and you're in. You have to have a reference program and they want you to qualify and not just sell stuff to members. You have to deliver value," Garbutt said. "You need to understand vertical requirements and customer requirements in that vertical and you have to sell services that are appropriate."
Banks have different needs than doctor's offices and N-able is making sure its partners have the right services to offer to each industry, Garbutt said.
"They all need basic IT stuff done but what they need from a reports or compliance perspective are quite different. You don't want to make a mistake. When auditors show up, they're not fooling around," he said.
N-able recently started rolling out Version 7.2 of its N-central platform and version 8.0 is set to be launched in April, Garbutt said.
