N-able Platform Upgrade Adds Printer, Router Support

In addition, the amount of time it takes to get a customer up and running has been reduced to less than an hour, said Gavin Garbutt, CEO of Ottawa-based N-able.

N-central 6.7 works in standard Microsoft environments but now includes heterogeneous products such as routers, switches, printers—anything with an IP address, Garbutt said.

"We have an application that is simple to use, provides advanced reporting capabilities for SLAs, all the different aspects of asset management, life-cycle management things and helps MSPs distinguish themselves and provide value to customers," Garbutt said. "This is about helping service providers do more with less, allowing customers to do more with less. How we help partners with their service delivery model with the business goals of the customers in mind."

Another new feature of N-central includes integration with Intel's vPro technology. Meanwhile, N-able's new N-compass 3.0 business reporting software includes flexible drag-and-drop report building, time-based SLA reporting, as well as asset reports that detail the performance and life-cycle expectations of all technologies tied to the network and allows for more strategic planning on hardware and software upgrades. N-able will introduce the updates at its N-able Partner Summit this week in Dallas.

"In [N-central] 6.0, we had power on/power off functionality. Now we have entire out-of-band remote control. You can remote-control sessions into the BIOS before the OS boots to help identify things preventing the machine from operating properly," Garbutt said. "[With vPro], our scripting takes control of those power-control capabilities to embed normally routine scripting like defrag, cleaning up. It can be scheduled for off-hours, then restore the power state back to where it was earlier."

Alan McDonald, president of All Connected, a Simi Valley, Calif.-based MSP, said the quicker deployment times and vPro integration will help his business.

"Anything we can do to reduce the discovery and deployment time is a great benefit from a profitability standpoint. The faster we can get a network done, the more issues we can avoid," McDonald said. Most customers' networks can be discovered in an hour or two, which allows All Connected to get a digital footprint and roll the customers' devices into the N-able dashboard, McDonald said.

"Previously, that might take six hours or 10 hours. We had to allow for a day. Now we've got guys coming in at the beginning of the day and they get the job done before lunch. It's nice to have it in that time frame."

All Connected believes it may be able to complete a network discovery task within the context of a customer visit, but he's not ready to guarantee that just yet.

"Another really neat thing is the Web-based remote control. We're really looking forward to that," McDonald said. "Before, to remote into into a device, we had to establish a VPN. Now it's a one- or two-click process. It saves a lot of time."