14 Hot Products For MSPs In 2024

The XChange 2024 conference offered solution providers the opportunity to see for the first time a variety of new technologies aimed at helping them find new ways to serve their customers.

MSP Tech In The Sunshine State

This month’s XChange 2024 conference in Orlando, Fla., hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, was home to a number of keynotes and presentations with artificial intelligence as part of their central messages, while the focus of MSP conversations in the halls between meetings often focused on learning from peers how they are benefiting from the technology in their own business.

ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and similar offerings were the topic of multiple presentations, while many presenters, vendors and MSPs alike, discussed how AI was impacting their products and services.

And yet, while AI had an outsized presence at XChange, it was far from the only technology talked about..

Instead, XChange 2024 was a place for MSPs to get together to learn from experts, particularly their peers, about best practices for successfully managing a managed services business: how to find and retain customers, how to navigate new regulatory and compliance issues impacting those customers and what to expect in the future from the technologies.

CRN editors walked the halls and the Solutions Pavilion to learn about the trends and see what is coming this year and beyond. Here are 14 new products that caught their attention.

Cynomi vCISO Platform

Cynomi’s automated platform aims to serve as a “true vCISO platform” for supporting MSPs, according to Royi Barnea, vice president of channel sales at Cynomi. “Most of the other players that I’m familiar with are positioning themselves as a GRC [governance, risk and compliance] tool,” Barnea said. However, “if you’re compliant, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re secured.” While Cynomi offers equivalent capabilities to a GRC tool, it goes further by conducting gap analysis, creating customized policies and developing a prioritized remediation plan to ensure that cybersecurity is addressed as well, according to the company. Cynomi now has 120 partners, up from about 30 a year ago, Barnea said.

Sophos MDR

With its fast-growing managed detection and response (MDR) offering, Sophos offers 24x7 monitoring and breach prevention, threat hunting and incident response, according to the company. The incident response component is very important for MSPs, according to Scott Barlow, vice president of global MSP and cloud alliances at Sophos. While MSPs have the option of simply being notified when there’s an issue, “we can also collaborate with the MSP,” Barlow said. “We’ll notify them and we’ll work with them to go and do the remediation.” MSPs can also authorize Sophos to perform the remediation itself, he said. “We're at a point where a lot of the partners trust us to go and do the remediation,” Barlow said.

OpenText Cybersecurity: Microsoft 365 Security Audit

Leveraging its close partnership with Microsoft, OpenText Cybersecurity offers a Microsoft 365 security audit tool to show MSPs how they can provide additional services around the ubiquitous productivity platform, according to the company. The goal is “to allow them to find the gaps within the portfolio so they can bring more value back to their own customers but also truly to make more money and profit,” said Steve Irons, senior vice president of cybersecurity sales at OpenText Cybersecurity. The Microsoft security audit tool is free to MSP partners, Irons said. While the tool has existed for several years, the company has recently “streamlined the process to make it easier [to use] so that it can be run on more of an automated basis and get more detailed security insights,” said Andrew Murphy, senior director of product marketing at OpenText Cybersecurity.

SOCSoter

SOCSoter, a multisignal managed detection and response tool, can be fully integrated into security stacks. Its hub allows MSPs to view threat intelligence feeds, incident response reports, compliance services, serverless or remote environments, custom escalations and real-time tickets.

The multisignal layered security that SOCSoter offers is central to protecting complete attack surfaces and takes into account data coming from multiple environments such as endpoints, networks, cloud, logs and vulnerability management. It’s flexible and customizable based on customer needs, offers certified compliance guidance for incident response and adheres to regulatory requirements, according to the company.

Automox

Automox takes a modern approach to managing endpoints with a simple, consolidated, automated and comprehensive VPN-free lightweight agent. The company aims to simplifiy the endpoint management toolset and removes any reliance on networks or inconsistent user connections.

With a single platform to address endpoints, Automox helps eliminate complex and unnecessary tools. It also schedules and automates patches, applies updates, manages configurations and deploys software to all endpoints.

Zorus

Zorus offers DNS web protection for the modern MSP. Its product is effective for remote teams, requires no changes to DNS settings, is device-based and unblocks requests for end users, according to the company.

It offers device-based web filtering and a view of end-user behavior and analytics. SaaS application user reports also detect and manage security risks associated with application usage.

JumpCloud

JumpCloud offers an open directory service for connecting any IT resource, allowing solution providers access across users, devices, security policies and a way to consolidate vendors around a centralized IT platform.

The company said it has integrations with more than 1,500 MSPs. It integrates with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform marketplaces.

Recent innovations to JumpCloud products include full support for Microsoft Edge, Brave and other Chromium-based browsers, increased Android enterprise mobility management functionality and Windows Lite-Touch Deployment through a provisioning package.

NinjaOne

Fresh off a $231.5 million funding round, NinjaOne, was at XChange March 2024 to talk up the IT management software vendor’s endpoint management automation capabilities for MSPs.

The vendor’s recent additions to its products include the ability to add event policy conditions through an API. Features in development include an integration with Bitdefender GravityZone, the ability to create public links for documentation assets and mobile device management for iOS and Android.

Thread

The startup’s motto is “death to the ticket,” and Thread positions its technology as a better way for MSPs to talk with customers in a chat experience from communication platforms including Microsoft Teams and Slack, integrating with MSP tools such as ConnectWise and Autotask.

Thread, founded in 2019, allows for answering questions, knowledge sharing, coordinated replies and other real-time collaboration actions to speed up resolution time, according to the company. Its artificial intelligence capabilities include automatic time entry writing, summarizing, suggesting next steps and more.

MSP users can save an hour a day for technicians and grow gross profit margin by 21 percent, according to Thread.

WhiteDog

WhiteDog, a developer of an MSP-focused security stack that can be easily updated as technology changes, was actually founded inside DataEndure, an MSP. The company, which last June came out of stealth mode, develops an enterprise security stack made of what Shaheen Pirooz, founder and CEO, said are individual, composable security components.

“For a lot of the market, the tools look great when they start, but five years later hackers change and the tool is no longer effective and you got to make a wholesale technology change,” Pirooz told CRN. “MSPs are struggling with keeping up with that constant change and leapfrogging and events like this. They’re trying to find other tools for their stack. So we built our stack for MSPs and designed it from the ground up to be white- labeled and indirect. WhiteDog will never sell direct to customers.”

DataEndure was WhiteDog’s first channel partner, but the company has already signed nine partners and has about 120,000 nodes it is securing globally across 23 countries and five continents, Pirooz said. He declined to discuss the actual vendors whose technologies are in the stack, but did say it includes XDR, MDR, EDR, advanced phishing protection, DNS defense, full-set SSE (secure service edge), and much more.

“So it’s a full enterprise stack with all the technologies that a MSP would build if it had the time and resources, all managed and operated by 24x7 security operations in the United States,” he said. We have built OEM relationships with the manufacturers, and we use those as the engines behind the scenes. And our portal makes it easy for an MSP to consume. It’s multitenant, and they get it branded as their own.”

The actual tools in the stack don’t change often, maybe every three or four years as they become obsolete, Pirooz said.

The upgrades to the stack are handled by WhiteDog on the back end, said Kiersten Burke, chief marketing officer for the company.

“The MSP doesn’t feel it,” Burke said. “The customers have minimal disruption. So the whole life cycle of tool evaluation, tool acquisition, tool management, we take that burden off the MSPs’ shoulders and do it on their behalf.”

Vertiv

Data center infrastructure manufacturer Vertiv has a new series of integrated offerings for computer environments from one-rack to multirack data center environments, said Peter Wolf, Northeast sales manager for the company.

“They essentially provide the infrastructure for servers, networks and everything from a small data center and one-rack environment to a multirack environment,” Wolf told CRN. “It’s essentially a self-contained box.”

Vertiv does not provide the servers, storage and networking equipment, leaving that up to solution providers, Wolf said.

The new offerings include SmartCabinet, a one-rack environment; SmartRow, for a multirack environment; and SmartAisle, a containment offering with separate hot aisle and cold aisle environments.

CodeTwo

CodeTwo, a developer of email signature management technology, was at XChange 2024 to show its Azure-based cloud service that automatically adds email signatures, legal disclaimers and branding to emails from any client device.

Sales Manager Ewelina Manka told CRN the company already has a large business with U.S.-based solution providers and MSPs and is looking to expand those relationships.

New from CodeTwo is a tool to unify a wide range of new capabilities to the flagship email signature and branding product, all included in the price, including the ability to work with different banners, links and social media icons and surveys to measure customer satisfaction, Manka said. The new version also works with no IT knowledge necessary, allowing marketing teams to directly handle all the tasks.

Crewhu

Crewhu, the developer of an employee recognition and customer satisfaction offering built specifically to help MSPs build better internal teams, was at XChange 2024 to show off a beta of its upcoming Automated Metric Bridge, which company Vice President Ryan Denning said enables MSPs to create contests around third-party software.

The goal of Automated Metric Bridge is to increase the KPIs, or key performance indicators, around MSPs’ partnerships with third-party software vendors, Denning told CRN. For instance, he said a contest could be developed around who has the most sales meetings.

“Or you could create a contest to see who can close the most tickets in a week, a month and a quarter,” he said. “This helps break up the monotony engineers face and makes it fun. The prize could be a gift card. Our system automatically generates the gift card and pays for it.”

Automated Metric Bridge is easy to set up using the third-party software’s API, Denning said. “There’s no need to integrate anything to automatically create and gamify a contest without waiting for other vendors to help,” he said.

Moovila

Moovila, which develops project and resource management software that is fully integrated with the ConnectWise PSA, is now looking to develop new integrations with other PSA providers, said Kate Schlarf, vice president of growth marketing.

“That will then enable us to reach more of this space,” Schlarf told CRN. “Also, people have been asking about the availability of templates so they can learn from other MSPs’ best practices. We want to offer that this year.”

Vince Jajuga, vice president of sales and partners, told CRN Moovila currently works with about 100 MSPs to bring leading-edge project and resource management to business users.