‘Look to N-able to trust in helping you enable your transformation,’ says N-able CEO John Pagliuca. ‘We’re the partner that can enable that transformation; we will help you bring more services to market and help you augment.’

Between new integrations with HaloPSA and Rewst and a new Cloud Commander offering, N-able is “laser-focused” on being the trusted partner for MSPs in helping them grow their business.

“Look to N-able to trust in helping you enable your transformation,” N-able CEO John Pagliuca told CRN in his message to MSPs. “We’re the partner that can enable that transformation; we will help you bring more services to market and help you augment.”

At N-able’s Empower conference in Frisco, Texas, last week, the Burlington, Mass.-based vendor unveiled new integrations with HaloPSA and Rewst. With the HaloPSA integration, N-able is now pushing and pulling data from the Halo platform and leveraging its AI functionality to drive more automation and efficiency.

The Rewst integrations allow MSPs to automate end-to-end workflows across multiple products, shorten time to value with more than 100 prebuilt automations, and connect applications together without having to write and maintain scripts or use APIs.

N-able also introduced Cloud Commander, a multitenant offering for the Microsoft Cloud to help MSPs manage, secure, standardize and automate Microsoft 365 users, Azure resources and Intune devices all from a single console.

“Cloud Commander is a platform that allows MSPs to leverage low-code, no-code automation to better manage the Microsoft clouds,” Pagliuca told CRN. “We bought a piece of technology in 2022 and we began bringing that to market that was more focused on M365.”

But partners wanted it across all their Microsoft applications, such as Azure, he said. “So we went back to the lab and we’ve been developing that with our teams so that MSPs can have one view across all of these bits,” Pagliuca said.

The bigger vision, according to Pagliuca, is that it will be integrated into N-able RMM.

“The big vision is an MSP in one dashboard,” he said. “With one view they can look at their customers’ endpoints and their workstations but also now look at the user.”

Pagliuca spoke with CRN about N-able’s Microsoft partnership, AI and how the company is empowering its partners.

Aside from Cloud Commander, what are other ways are N-able harnessing the Microsoft partnership?

Our Cove data protection offering, which is an M365 backup. In the terms and conditions in Microsoft, they suggest to their customers that they have third-party cloud-based backup, which goes back to that resiliency bit. We have a fantastic M365 offering, and it’s built right into our console. It’s actually our fastest-growing SKU across all of our portfolios. MSPs are adding M365 backup to their offering, making sure that their customers are more resilient. It can be a ransomware attack or … you might blow up your own data and you need to recover that data ASAP.

Our teams have a close relationship with Microsoft in that we know that that’s where MSPs spend a lot of their time. When we talk about the modern workplace of an SME [small, medium enterprise], a lot of that has to do with Microsoft. The better that we can help MSPs monitor and manage those environments and keep those environments secure, the better it aligns with our mission and vision.

When we spoke a few months ago, you said you’re focused on GenAI going forward. What’s the latest movement on that?

So there are a couple of different fronts. No. 1, we’re using it internally to help build code. Our developers are leveraging AI to autocomplete a bunch of code but also more secure code because we can check it a lot. More efficient developers on our side means we can bring things to the MSP community faster. Our sales and marketing teams also use AI for email scripting. What people need to be mindful of is not to be dropping their source code into these truly black holes. You’re not really sure where that data is. That’s what we want to warn the MSP community [about]— make sure that they’re not necessarily just dropping their source code in.

We’ve introduced ChatGPT into N-Central so that gives MSPs the ability to write and help them complete automation scripts. These are early days—it’s not really regulated and we know that these models are in their infancy. What you hear a lot, from a buzzword point of view, is that the AI is hallucinating and we have good examples of that across the board. People need to be very mindful, and they need to keep the human in the loop. I don’t see that changing; it’ll drive efficiency just by helping you get to the next thought or helping you construct something. But the human is required—remember, it’s ‘artificial’ intelligence. We need to make sure that the human intelligence is making sure that it’s applied in the right way.

You also told me recently that you’re 100 percent focused on MSPs. With that in mind, what are you seeing from them?

The channel is very healthy. … Ninety-seven percent of MSPs plan on growing [in] 2024, with two-thirds of them [planning] on growing by double digits. The channel is growing by what I call the ‘X and Y axis’. On the Y axis, MSPs are going upmarket, they’re beginning to go into the midmarket with this co-managed model. Then on the X axis they’re bringing in more services. We’re excited because whenever you have a market growing in two dimensions, that’s when we get that growth.

Our strategy is to help the MSP reach both the Y axis and X axis get upmarket but also bring more services. We’re putting MSPs on the right track with the right cohorts so they can get to their next level. We’re laser-focused on that being our mission, to empower these MSPs to get to their goals.

In February, ConnectWise had the ScreenConnect vulnerability. Seeing that, did you take a step back and look at your own systems? And do you think ConnectWise did a good job handling it?

So what I’ll say is we continue to monitor what the bad guys are doing. Whether it be the ConnectWise incident, the Kaseya incident or, frankly, incidents across the software universe, those are all learnings. What separates humans from animals is we don’t need to actually learn first-hand—we can learn from the events that have happened to others. So yes, we 100 percent look at all these bits and we understand what the bad guys did and how they infiltrated. We always look to learn from it, and for us that’s what the laser focus is on.

We’re one strong MSP community and we know that the bad guys are laser-focused on the MSPs but also the vendors. I think we need to stand united in making sure it’s not necessarily me against ConnectWise or one MSP versus another. It’s really about the community standing up and making sure that we’re defending against these bad guys.

What’s your overall message to MSPs about all the initiatives N-able is taking this year?

I’d say look to N-able to trust and help you enable your transformation. We’re the partner that can enable that transformation; we will help you bring more services to market and help you augment. We’re the partner that you can look to future-proof your business, whether it be Cloud Commander or with our Cove offering. N-able is a trusted partner, and we have your back in helping you get to your goals.