N-able To Launch New Partner Care Program

The company is also launching Partner Care, an initiative intended to aid its 175-plus partners across North America in their quest to become managed service providers. N-able is adding about 50 new partners per quarter and is generating about $500,000 in revenue from channel sales each month, said Mark Scott, president and CEO of the Ottawa-based company.

N-central 3.0 features automate the network monitoring process with capabilities such as auto-discovery. N-able also added support for integration with protocols, such as SNMP, that help partners delve deeper into the performance of devices such as routers, switches, servers and firewalls, with all customer performance information accessible on one console.

"The hook-ins or integration work we've done are like APIs into our system," Scott said. "With this feature, partners can highly customize what they monitor down to setting performance thresholds for the toner service on a Lexmark printer, for example."

Gary Pica, principal at Dynamic Digital Services, a Levittown, Pa.-based outsourcing provider that acts as the IT department for 90 small businesses, has been beta-testing N-central 3.0 and plans to use the new features to manage his customers' networks. "With new auto-discovery features, a smart agent comes back and tells us the DNS is running this IP service, for example, which automates the process and saves us a lot of time."

Support for bandwidth monitoring now allows partners to track network utilization and performance thresholds across the WAN and LAN.

N-able's new Partner Care effort gives partners access to sales and business re-engineering training and support, technical training and support, marketing tools and success strategies, Scott said. "We'll help them figure out how to price their offerings, find the right customer base and how to sell managed services."