N-able’s Roadmap to $1 Billion in ARR Includes a Big Push into Resale
That’s one of three topics president and CEO John Pagliuca discussed recently, along with forthcoming product updates you’re reading about here for the first time anywhere.
Last week’s post quoted John Pagliuca, president and CEO of N-able, on the growth of mega MSPs and its implications for smaller competitors. I actually got into three other topics with him during the interview that produced those quotes that I’m finally sharing now:
1. Why reselling N-able software into corporate IT is a major potential growth lever. Rania Succar, Kaseya’s new CEO, mentioned during a podcast interview recorded at The 20’s Vision conference last month that turning inbound leads from IT departments into co-sell opportunities with MSPs is on a menu of items she’s considering to help partners drive organic growth. Turns out N-able has somewhat similar plans.
I say “somewhat” because the company isn’t, so far as I can tell, planning to attend sales meetings with partners. But it very much does plan to help MSPs add revenue by reselling its software into mid-market accounts. Indeed, during N-able’s latest Investor Day in March, Pagliuca (pictured) presented sell-through income from partners as one of the three ways (along with doubling down on cybersecurity and expanding adoption among existing users) it will use to get from this year’s estimated $518 million of ARR to an eventual $1 billion.
Partners other than MSPs, it’s worth noting, figure prominently in that initiative. “Up until now, about 85% of N-able’s revenue has been focused on only a quarter of the channel,” as in MSPs, Pagliuca told attendees at that event. The VARs in the other three quarters, he continued, represent a “massive opportunity.”
2. How N-able accommodates large and small MSPs through the same platform. During an onstage appearance at Vision, Pagliuca noted that N-able has multiple billion-dollar MSPs in its partner base these days. I’ve been thinking about something on and off again ever since that probably should have occurred to me earlier: it’s got to be hard building one product set suitable for both giant MSPs and tiny ones.
I asked Succar, of Kaseya, about the matter during our interview; her answer inspired the first few paragraphs of this piece. I didn’t get a chance to ask Pagliuca, though, until days after the Vision conference was done. Yes, he said, big companies and small companies need different things from software.
“If you’re a Fortune 1000 company, you might need the power of an Oracle or SAP type of ERP,” Pagliuca observed, “but if you’re a smaller shop, you might need a Peachtree or QuickBooks that already has some of the templates in place.”
The same applies for MSPs, he adds, and N-able’s strategy for accommodating both needs in the same product is to include a lot of customizability for the big MSPs and a lot of ready-made components for the small ones.
“We gear our technology to scale for the best in class, for those billion-dollar folks, but then through our tools and through our people, we’ll provide the training wheels and the templates so that the smaller shops can still drive their business to be effective,” Pagliuca says, noting that the company’s N-central RMM solution exemplifies that approach.
“We give folks the ability to use low-code, no-code automation to make custom features,” he says. “The big shops really like that,” he adds. “For the smaller shops, that can be a little bit overwhelming.”
Worth noting that “ecoverse” integrations with alliance partners in the vendor community are another piece of N-able’s customizability game plan, and also that ConnectWise isn’t the only vendor into connective tissue. “We’ve invested in our APIs and giving folks the ability to leverage natural language and AI to go and create this connective tissue between different tools,” Pagliuca says.
3. Disaster recovery in N-able’s cloud along with network and cloud vulnerability management are on the product roadmap. Pagliuca got applause from his audience at Vision when he announced that users of the company’s Cove BDR solution will soon be able to recover end user environments in N-able’s cloud. “If you’re a smaller shop, you don’t have to have your own cloud environment,” Pagliuca says, adding that a limited preview of that feature is coming soon.
Coming next year, meanwhile, are two extensions of the vulnerability management feature the company tacked onto its two RMM solutions, N‑central and N‑sight, in April. The first will add network scanning to the original tool’s endpoint scanning. The second will add cloud scanning. “Think something like a baby Wiz,” Pagliuca explains.
Why haven’t you read about those forthcoming releases elsewhere? N-able isn’t talking about them publicly yet. “But I’m happy for you to leak a couple of things,” Pagliuca says with a sly smile.