What’s N-able?

Ask most MSPs, and they’ll say it’s a managed services software vendor. Ask N-able itself and it’ll tell you it’s a security vendor.

Even people with fewer gray hairs than me can remember a time when people in and around managed services referred to ConnectWise, Kaseya, N-able, and Datto as “the big four”. Then Kaseya bought Datto, NinjaOne went unicorn, and the big four had a slightly different composition. But the term still referred to the industry’s largest RMM/PSA vendors, and N-able was still one of them.

Except that it wasn’t, or isn’t, and not because its market share slipped behind Ninja’s last December. According to the company itself, N-able isn’t an RMM/PSA vendor anymore.

“We’re no longer in the endpoint management business,” says Robert Johnston (pictured), the GM in charge of N-able’s Adlumin MDR service. “We’re in the security business.”

To be clear, N-able does offer endpoint management solutions, but mostly, Johnston says, because patching software and eliminating vulnerabilities are important security functions. The company’s hottest sellers and true calling cards right now are its Adlumin MDR/XDR business and Cove, its data protection solution. As a result, N-able views companies like Barracuda and Sophos as its truest rivals and regards ConnectWise and Kaseya as competitors when they’re selling security services and integration partners when they’re not.

“You can call them frenemies,” Johnston says.

The latest example of N-able’s security-first mission came on the second day of the Top Down Horizons conference when it announced that a CMMC 2.0-compliant version of its N-central endpoint management solution is now in public preview before going GA sometime in Q1 next year. According to Johnston, the update came in response to requests from its MSP partners.

“It’s important to our customers because it’s important to their customers,” he says. “MSPs support a huge part of the Defense Industrial Base.”

Those that don’t meet CMMC requirements risk losing DIB clients. “It’s an immediate churn risk,” Johnston says, adding that it’s a sales opportunity as well for providers who are CMMC-compliant.

“They’re going to be able to hoover up a lot of those customers that came from less progressive MSPs,” he notes. In time, he continues, the rest of N-able’s portfolio will be CMMC-ready too.

“The whole company will be on a path to achieve CMMC compliance,” Johnston says. “There’s no hard date, but we’re actively working on it.”