An MCP for MSPs?

CAT-MIP, a new initiative launched by N-able, aims to do what MCP creator Anthropic did: Create a cross-vendor standard for solving a critical AI problem.

Safe to say that whenever Syncro’s forthcoming agentic solutions arrive, they’ll be a whole lot more useful to people if they can communicate with everyone else’s agentic solutions, which common sense further tells us is more likely to happen if all those solutions share a common vocabulary.

“How do you describe an asset? How do you describe a threat? How do you describe a file? How do you describe a user in order to really properly and quickly take advantage of agentic AI?” asked Mike Adler (pictured), N-able’s chief technology and product officer, during an MSP Summit conversation. “If we can all talk the same way, our ability to teach the AIs and train the AIs to take actions in each other’s systems to automate workflows and to make better decisions about data is going to exponentially accelerate.”

The thing about languages, though, is that you can’t create one (that anyone wants to speak, anyway) on your own. “So what we decided to do was to create a standards body,” Adler says.

That was early this year, but the world didn’t hear about it until early this month, when N-able officially announced the Consortium for AI Terminology for MSPs & IT Pros, aka CAT-MIP, a collection of vendors writing a vendor-neutral dictionary designed to ensure that when my agent asks yours to open a port, your agent doesn’t think I want to build a harbor. N-able spearheaded the initiative but doesn’t own it.

“We put some dollars around sponsorship and making sure that it can exist, but it is not within our control,” Adler says. “There’s a board.” Auvik Networks, Dell, HaloPSA, SecurityBiaS, ScalePad, and SPINEN are all members, with other vendors Adler declined to specify set to join soon.

As are additional unnamed vendors more commonly associated with the enterprise, according to Adler. In much the way that Anthropic’s (very different) MCP protocol slowly gained traction as more and more technology companies realized how useful it is, CAT-MIP’s schema is apparently building momentum too.

“Parties who are in IT but outside of our traditional MSP industry have already reached out and are very interested because of the connectivity that it could bring to entire workflows,” Adler says.