Bonus Post: Four Pre-Holiday Appetizers
Have you ever loaded up a plate at Thanksgiving with more food than you can eat? That’s me when it comes to meetings at a conference like ConnectWise’s recent IT Nation Connect show. There are so many vendors I want to catch up with that I inevitably end up flying home stuffed with thoughts yet too lethargic to write about them all right away.
But I’ve finally caught up. Here are four quick stories from companies I spoke with either during IT Nation Connect, or in the case of this first item from Nerdio, just before it.
Nerdio’s even more all-in on Microsoft
Nerdio has long been an interesting outlier in the managed services software world. Like ConnectWise and Kaseya, it’s a big believer in multi-function suites. Unlike those and many other IT management companies, however, Nerdio’s laser focused on the Microsoft cloud. Fortunately for us, says CRO Joseph Landes, so is most of the SMB channel.
“You go into any room of MSPs and say, ‘hey, raise your hand if you’re using Microsoft 365,’ and it’s like 100% of them,” he observes. “By default, every MSP is betting on the Microsoft cloud.”
With that need in mind, Nerdio has been gradually turning Nerdio Manager for MSP into an all-purpose admin tool for MSPs who are all-in on Microsoft. What began principally as a tool for overseeing Azure Virtual Desktop environments gained support for the newly launched Windows 365 in 2021, virtual endpoint management the following year, and physical endpoint management via an integration with Microsoft Intune the year after that.
This year, in updates previewed in February and introduced progressively since, the company has added Windows application management and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. The most significant expansion in three years though, arguably, came last month when Nerdio rolled the monarch of Microsoft’s online empire—Microsoft 365—into the platform.
The new functionality supports centralized multi-tenant management of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange Online, Defender for Endpoint, and—perhaps most significant of all—the Entra ID identity and access management service. As we’ve noted here before recently, cloud security is becoming increasingly synonymous with security period, and identity management is the linchpin to cloud security.
“It’s going to allow them to leverage one of the biggest investments they’re already making in the Microsoft cloud,” says Landes (pictured) of the new feature’s impact on MSPs.
Another enhancement made possible through an alliance with the Center for Internet Security adds an extensive set of ready-made CIS policies for securing Windows 10 and Windows 11 Intune assets to the platform.
“We’ve licensed essentially all their security policies,” Landes says. “All of a sudden, you have 1,000 pre-populated policies that have been approved by CIS that you can just choose from.”
A separate change also announced in October allows MSPs to pay for Nerdio Manager on a per tenant per month, rather than per device or user, basis.
“This model will enable MSPs to really manage their entire customer environment, large or small, with very predictable costs,” Landes says.
Nerdio currently charges $50 a month per tenant under an introductory pricing scheme with no set end date. “I’m not saying that’s going to continue forever,” Landes says, “but we’d like to stay there.”
Auvik moves out to endpoints and up to larger MSPs
Networks, on the other hand, are forever for sure. What it takes to manage networks, however, has changed in recent years as workloads have migrated to the cloud and workforces have gone hybrid.
Auvik plans to take the next step in an ongoing process of adapting its network management platform to those evolving demands early next year when it introduces endpoint monitoring capabilities aimed at enabling technicians to trace network performance issues all the way to laptops and other roaming devices. Like other recent enhancements, the new feature is designed to make a potentially complex task simpler at a time when finding people with deep network management skills is growing increasingly difficult.
“There’s a little bit of a shrinking labor pool and a shrinking experience pool of who’s really deeply familiar with the network,” says Auvik President Mark Ralls (pictured). “We need to be able to provide you a very clear signal when there are challenges in the network of where those are and how to address them, because your network team may be 10 or 20 percent of the size of your overall service organization.”
Northstar, the troubleshooting tool Auvik introduced in September, exemplifies that design philosophy.
“If you have a connectivity problem between two devices, Northstar allows you to very precisely walk the path between them and troubleshoot that in a very visual way,” rather than via the command line, Ralls says. New alerting functionality introduced alongside Northstar similarly aims to save overstretched network administrators time by filtering out nuisance warnings unworthy of attention.
“That’s something that our larger MSPs have driven us towards, and that’s where we’ve made big investments in the product,” Ralls says.
A lot of Auvik’s roadmap thinking these days, in fact, revolves around the needs of larger, typically private equity-backed MSPs, which will account for a growing share of network management spending going forward.
“We’re private equity backed too, so we understand what that mentality is, what’s involved there, and the operating discipline that they expect,” Ralls says. “We’re upping our service levels accordingly, and making sure that as MSPs move upmarket, we can move with them.”
Plans like that predate June, when Ralls stepped into his current role. Other recent changes, like an accelerated new partner onboarding process, directly reflect his influence.
“We’ve cut that in half in the last three months,” Ralls says. “That’s just a real focus on communication and process discipline between our sales organization and our customer success and onboarding teams.” The hope is that it ensures the net revenue retention issues plaguing so many other vendors don’t afflict Auvik too.
“I’m responsible for our revenue growth overall as a company, which is both how do we land new revenue and how do we renew and grow our existing revenue,” Ralls says. “If we aren’t setting [partners] up for success on Auvik with Auvik best practices from day one, then that’s not going to work out well, and we shouldn’t be surprised if a year from now some percentage of those customers is looking elsewhere.”
Pax8 wants to sell everywhere MSPs buy
Blink and you could have missed it, but buried in my IT Nation Connect coverage a few weeks back was a passing reference to an interesting fact: the next-generation cloud computing marketplace that Pax8 invested years of effort and millions of dollars in before its official rollout in June, will be available from directly inside ConnectWise’s also highly strategic Security360 solution.
The idea is to let ConnectWise partners who buy software from Pax8 add a solution to an end client’s security stack from directly within the same single pane of glass they use to manage the rest of that customers security needs. It also, however, reflects a larger commitment by both Pax8 and ConnectWise (which has a marketplace of its own, after all) to give partners the freedom to procure what they want from whoever they choose.
“That kind of open ecosystem and working together, I think, is a huge advantage not only for the MSPs obviously, but also I think for us vendors,” says Rob Rae (pictured), the company’s corporate vice president of community and ecosystems. “It just makes you work harder for that MSP’s business, and I think we’ve never been shy about that.”
The integration pact, disclosed just weeks after the two companies announced a strategic partnership to offer ConnectWise’s MDR solution in the Pax8 marketplace, reflects a separate commitment on Pax8’s part to transact business with MSPs wherever MSPs transact business, even if that’s in someone else’s platform.
“We built this engine that can support the delivery of what they’re buying and then the billing data associated with what they’re buying,” says Ryan Walsh, the company’s chief strategy officer. “We should be everywhere that happens, and that requires that we integrate.”
Integration is an essential part as well of Pax8’s broader re-definition of itself as a marketplace rather than distributor. Distributors help partners resell products and services. We, Pax8 argues, are building something far more disruptive via cutting-edge automation, analytics, and (needless to say) AI.
“Marketplace is just a word that everybody is starting to use,” Rae says. “We want to make sure MSPs understand that when we say marketplace, it’s not just a trendy new word. It’s legit technology innovation.”
As I’ve noted before, for a company like Pax8, shifting from distributor to marketplace means competing not only with distributors but with cloud hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft and marketplace-only vendors like Tackle and AppDirect. That, in turn, means looking for new ways to earn partner loyalty, such as the partner program Pax8 introduced early this month. Called Voyager Alliance, it features five tiers offering increasingly rich benefits to members as their Pax8 spend grows.
“It’s our way to reward partners who are trying to service their customers, do that in a loyalty-based way, deepen the relationship that we have with them, and give them some of the benefits that an enterprise would get on a hyperscaler marketplace,” Walsh says.
It also reflects a realization within Pax8 that its partner base has gotten big enough to require a more targeted approach to relationship-building tailored to each partner’s size and maturity.
“We have very, very small MSPs now and very, very large MSPs, and one size fits all just doesn’t work anymore,” Rae says. “You can’t treat a smaller client the same way you can a mega client and those products and services, the experience that they have with your organization, just can’t be the same.”
N-able invests in behavioral BDR
Behavioral economics is a branch of the dismal science dedicated to the idea that people, no matter how rational or well informed they are, regularly make very bad decisions.
Like not enrolling in their employer’s 401(k) plan, for example. Ask newly hired workers to opt into retirement saving, T. Rowe Price has found, and just 44% do. Enroll them in a 401(k) by default, on the other hand, and 86% end up staying enrolled even though they can opt out whenever they like. According to Vanguard, fully 77% of workplace retirement plans with over 1,000 participants now feature auto-enrollment, an idea directly inspired by behavioral economics, as a result.
I’m not sure if N-able has a behavioral economist on staff, but the company sure seems to think like one when it comes to BDR.
Attackers attempted to compromise backup data at 94% of organizations struck by ransomware in the prior year and succeeded 57% of them time, according to research published by Sophos in March. Well aware of facts like that, experts have long advised MSPs to store immutable copies of protected data for clients somewhere even a determined attacker can’t access them.
And yet, all too many don’t. So rather than require MSPs to deploy and configure the immutable backup feature it recently added to its Cove data protection solution, or even make them go through the bother of switching it on, N-able provides it to them by default.
“When technicians can make decisions, obviously, they can make the wrong decisions,” observes Chris Groot (pictured), general manager of the Cove platform. “If you just have it on by default, you’ve made the right choice for everyone.”
My words, not N-able’s, but it sounds a lot like behavioral BDR. Only on steroids, because not only is there no need to opt into the new service, called Fortified Copies, there’s no way to opt out.
“You don’t even have to think about the choice,” Groot says. “It’s just done for you.”
At no extra cost, he adds, and in a place neither threat actors nor their would-be victims can get to via Cove’s UI, command line interface, or APIs. The simplicity of the whole arrangement, according to Groot, has benefits extending beyond safer data.
“It allows you then to have your most junior technician be the one who ultimately can be running your backup and disaster recovery part of the business, which of course gets you the outcome of higher profitability,” he says.
N-able has similarly inspired Cove functionality in development. Applying data retention policies for employees when they leave a company takes time and effort, Groot notes. “Being able to automate those processes so it becomes a truly set and forget it experience [is] the sort of direction that customers are asking us for.”
Look for enhanced PSA integrations next year as well, Groot adds. “We’re modernizing that both from the billing side of the equation and the alerting side of the equation, because we want our customers to be able to work in whatever interface they like to work in, and today most often that’s the PSA.”