N-able Gives Away $75 Million In Managed Services, Security Licenses

The licenses include 2.6 million copies of its new Essential product, a light version of its full N-central maintenance and support solution. For each full license they have deployed, N-able's current MSPs will receive a matching number of free Essential licenses to market to new customers. In addition, MSPs will receive a one-year N-able Endpoint Security license for each node they have with their customers, including the professional and Essential versions. N-able's Endpoint Security includes antivirus, antispam, antimalware, personal firewall and host intrusion prevention for Windows devices.

Garbutt made the announcement during a keynote address at N-able's Partner Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The goal of the free licenses is to expose the majority of SMBs to managed services that they otherwise might not try, Garbutt told Channelweb.com.

"This is something to deploy at all your nonmanaged customers to do asset management, basic monitoring and management," Garbutt said. "The beauty is you can seamlessly upgrade to a full professional license. There's no uninstall and reinstall. It's just seamless in the GUI, which deals with issues of cost and complexity of the deployment."

N-able has spent about 18 months developing the Essential version of N-central to get customers hooked, he said.

"The reality is only 10 percent of SMBs currently receive real value-based managed services," Garbutt said. "Looking at the economic conditions, what are the real roadblocks to really significantly penetrating the SMB market with managed services?"

The free licenses are based around N-able's new N-central 7.0 release, he added.

"7.0 is really designed around how do we help overcome the traditional barriers of adoption, from a cost perspective and a complexity perspective to SMB customers," Garbutt said. "It's about bringing a critical value that the customer absolutely needs and wants. Now you can go to all your nonmanaged or managed customers and say, "We'll give you 12 months free.' "

It's an opportunity for MSPS to give customers something for free, something Garbutt believes will drive adoption in this economy.

"Use this as wedge to get in [with customers]. Our goal is to help partners have an unfair advantage over competitors. It's an SMB land grab for MSPs," Garbutt said.

N-able is limiting the free licenses to its existing partners to help them improve their businesses as opposed to recruiting new partners with the deal, he said.

Once MSPs have a customer running on Essentials, they can assess the environment to find what devices might be better served with a full, professional license, Garbutt said.

"It's understanding that you need Essentials to get that information to understand the customer environment, to show them reports with their strengths and weaknesses and these are the key devices for advanced monitoring and upgrades," he said.

"My principal interest is if we provide the right solution, we'll get a much bigger share of the market," he added. "I'm not concerned with the 10 percent of SMBs that are managed. How do I make sure our channel is equipped with the right solution to penetrate that other 90 percent?"