N-Able Partners with Intronis, Sees Strong Growth Ahead

Intronis and N-Able Technologies joined forces this week to integrate Intronis’ Online Backup + Recovery with N-able’s N-central 7.0 with Endpoint Security Manager, allowing MSPs to track backup and recovery statuses, notifications, and other events via the same centralized interface that they use to perform remote monitoring and management functions. 

Boston-based Intronis is a developer of online data backup, archiving, and recovery solutions for managed service providers, while N-able provides RMM software.

The partnership is all about simplifying the deployment of backup and recovery solutions and easing the sales process, says Rob Bissett, N-able’s Director of Product Management. The integration was largely driven by N-able’s customers who were using both companies’ technologies.

"A number of our partners came to us and said we should be working with them," he says. As integration is one of the core pieces of the N-central platform, it just made sense, he adds.

The market for backup and recovery solutions has been hot of late, spurred on by disruptive technologies and the changing regulatory environment, but there is no one-solution-fits-all, says Bissett. "The perfect backup solution doesn’t really exist yet."

However there are a lot of very good partial solutions available, and those like Intronis’ offer a great opportunity for MSPs to do a value-based sale to their customers. "It’s almost created a perfect storm for service providers."

Intronis’ Online Backup + Recovery offers secure, automatic backup, as well as on-demand restoration and archiving for Exchange and SQL databases, file servers, user files and email.  Data is protected in transit and in storage by 256-bit AES encryption and is stored encrypted in SAS 70 mirrored data centers located thousands of miles apart. The solution allows versioning, and minimizes bandwidth demands through the company’s Intelliblox block-level technology. 

Last year was a good year for N-Able, and the company is looking for comparable or better growth in 2010, says Derek Belair, VP Marketing. The company posted a 300 percent increase in subscription sales. "It’s all about N-Able selling the way people want to buy and making as many options available as our partners and customers want," he says.

N-Able also doubled its international revenue in 2009 and will be investing more in 2010, "making sure we continue to capitalize on those opportunities," says Belair.

Two recent N-Able initiatives have also taken off, and should help drive future growth, he says. The company discovered that the midmarket — 100-1,000 seats, with 250 the sweet spot — was not getting the attention it deserved, so it rolled out a new program that provided partners with technical and/or sales assistance. It signed up more than 100 partners and is looking to double its business in this segment, says Belair. The partners who signed up have been "incredibly successful", and this will be one of N-Able’s key growth areas in 2010.

The other initiative, announced in December, and launched last week, was a free licensing promotion. The freemium software and related programs introduced in N-central 7.0 represent a $75-million investment, providing all N-able partners with a current N-central maintenance and support subscription a matching number of free Essential Licenses for all Professional Licenses purchased. In addition, for a limited time these partners will receive at no charge double the amount of new Endpoint Security Manager licenses, valid for one year.

The early results have been excellent, says Belair. Customer feedback has been tremendous and the company has been flooded with requests for trials, surpassing anything it’s seen in the past. "We’re trying to get to everybody’s request as quickly as possible."