N-able Adds Mac Support To Managed Services Platform

The Ottawa-based managed service provider (MSP) platform vendor said Tuesday it will add support for Apple Macintosh operating systems in the second quarter of this year.

N-able's modular Velocity System MSP product , and flagship N-central 5.1 MSP product will each begin shipping with native Mac OS X agents that will allow Mac PCs and servers to come under the remote management umbrellas of the two products, said Bill Stewart, vice president of marketing.

In much the same way N-able's products currently support MSP offerings to Windows-based networks, the Mac-enabled products will give MSPs the ability to monitor the status of Mac workstations and servers, send alerts, and deliver network status reports, said Brent Winsor, product marketing manager.

Mac systems typically exist within Windows networks, and N-able will soon have a way to bring remote management of these blended networks to a single platform and user console, Stewart said.

"The advantage of this is if you go into an organization that has a mixed Windows and Mac environment you can say 'we will support everything you have,'" Stewart said.

Mac-readiness will not change N-able's current pricing schemes, he said.

N-able is not the first MSP platform vendor to offer Mac support, said Marcial Velez, president of Xperteks Computer Consultancy, a Mac-focused solution provider and MSP in New York City.

Velez said he went looking for an MSP platform that supported Macs just over a year ago. He ended up going with N-able rival Silverback Technologies, Billerica, Mass., because at the time neither N-able, nor rival LPI Level Platforms, Ottawa, stepped up to the challenge of helping him work with Macs, he said.

"As soon as I said I needed an MSP tool for Macs they just cringed," Velez said of N-able and LPI. "Then the people from Silverback gave me a call back and told me they would love to work with us on Mac."

It took about two months for Silverback to develop a Mac OS X agent that allowed proper SNMP monitoring of Mac devices, Velez said.

N-able's approach to Mac support is more sophisticated than mere SNMP monitoring, said Winsor. N-able will incorporate a native Mac OS X engine as part of its Mac support approach, and this will give N-able users a deeper view of Mac systems being monitored, a view that includes process availability and log analysis, he said.