Some Vendors Fear SaaSpocalyptic Disintermediation. N-Able Doesn’t.
The company’s new MCP server is a first step toward embracing an inevitable future in which MSPs never interact with its interface.
At least three companies I’m aware of made MCP-related news last week. One was N-able, which unveiled a new MCP server giving third-party AI solutions direct access to data in the company’s unified endpoint management systems. The other two are Salesforce and GreenCore Solutions Corp.
And who, you ask, is GreenCore Solutions Corp.? Why, none other than the maker of the TreeFree Diaper®, an environmentally responsible alternative to the likes of Pampers and Huggies that’s now also, thanks to GreenCore’s new MCP server, “the first AI-ready diaper SKU in the market.”
Laugh if you like, but I applaud their vision. Parents have done the diaper shopping for about as long as retailers have sold diapers, but in the not-too-distant future their agents will perform that function instead. Rather than fight that development and its troubling implications for brand awareness and customer relationships, GreenCore is embracing the inevitable.
So is N-able. Some CEOs undoubtedly fear becoming an invisible data lake for MSPs who use Claude or ChatGPT as their primary help desk tool. N-able president and CEO John Pagliuca (like the folks at BDR vendor Slide) is entirely chill about it.
“Some folks in MSP-land and enterprise are going to choose to have a different interface experience, and so they might not be spending all of their time in the SaaS tools, which troubles a bunch of SaaS vendors,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Everyone else should get used to it too, Robert Johnston, the VP and GM in charge of N-able’s Adlumin business, adds. “The writing on the wall is customers expect to be able to chat and interact with their systems and command them to do things and consume information from them in a natural language format,” he says. “That’s just the bandwagon all the software vendors have to get on, because consumer expectations are going to go that way.”
And by consumer he very much means MSPs, and all of them, within perhaps five to seven years. No matter how intuitive their design, today’s RMM solutions take time to learn. “What MCP kind of allows you to do and AI allows you to do is erase that to zero. You just have to know what you want and somewhat what the system is capable of doing, and then you can just chat it in or voice it in and it’ll figure it out for you,” Johnston says. “You don’t have to learn the UI anymore.”
N-able doesn’t even mind the disintermediating prospect of ending up a contributing data provider to someone else’s newer system of action or more all-encompassing system of record.
“Different folks will bring different AI solutions to the market,” N-able chief technology and product officer Mike Adler says. “We can provide them pieces. We gain economic value. They gain economic value. It’s a win for both of us.”
And a source of competitive advantage over less forward-thinking peers, he adds. “We’re able to service different kinds of customers from the same avenue.”
Two pod interviews for the price of one!
And that price is nothing. I spent the first part of last week, before my visit to N-able Empower, at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, moderating panels, speaking (off the record) with Shield Technology Partners CEO Jim Siders for the first time, and recording two interviews for MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. One was with Bobby DeMarzo, the impresario in charge of the Channel Partners show. The other was with Peter Kujawa, the EVP in charge of ConnectWise’s IT Nation and Service Leadership groups. Both are included in the latest episode, available here.
