N-able execs lay down their one message to partners at Empower 2025

Vendor top dogs tell CRN what they want channel firms to take away from the Berlin event, and name the biggest trend impacting partner businesses

N-able is evolving into a cyber resilience company and a full channel organisation, and its channel partners need to get on board with this mission.

This has been the top line this week at N-able’s Empower 2025 partner conference in Berlin, Germany.

During his opening keynote, N-able CEO John Pagliuca urged MSPs to focus on cyber resiliency to fortify their security operations, ensuring growth and continuity in the face of cyberthreats.

To learn more and hear from the rest of the vendor’s leadership team, CRN got in front of some of N-able’s key channel bosses to hear the top take away they want partners to get from Empower, and the most impactful market trends influencing their businesses.

John Pagiluca, CEO

What message do you want partners to take away from this event?

“The centerpiece of the event is not just on security, but more the cyber resiliency.

“We’ll be hammering this home because it's different.

“It's a different conversation that they need to have with their customers. It's a different conversation they need to have with their own teams internally.

“And it's a different conversation with different propositions to their business algorithm.

“It's less about just protecting and it's more about resiliency. And why I think that's interesting as well is because it goes beyond the scope of this threat actors.

“It includes natural disasters. It can be a flood. It can be a fire, or a lot of times, things that we don't talk about there is what we call friendly fire. A lot of the times an employee might delete a bunch of your data or corrupt a bunch of your data with nothing nefarious, just by a misstep or a miscue.

“And so how do you build that resiliency there? So, I think the story is more about cyber and business resiliency.”

What are some of the key market trends you’re seeing that are impacting your channel partners’ business the most?

“I do believe security operations is the number one thing that affects customers.

“If left to its own devices, it will impact the retention. They will lose a customer. And then, if they go on the offense, as opposed to the defense, they can use it to expand their customer base, and they can land new customers.

“I honestly think it's democratising security. Security is a term that can be ambiguous sometimes and scary other times, and our job at N-able and for the MSP community is to take the ambiguity out and to simplify.

“What we've been able to do leveraging technology like AI, with Adlumin as an example, we can democratise the technology.

“So what do I mean? What used to be maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars to invest in, we now allow MSPs to buy for as low as six or seven dollars per user per month, because we're leveraging AI and it doesn't require so many humans in the loop.

“Now a two-person MSP can present themselves as a cyber resilient shop, and they know that they have 24/7 security analysts behind them watching the threats at the same level of expertise.

That didn't exist ten years ago. And so now with this technology, we really democratise it, so the smaller end of the MSPs and the very large MSPs can leverage this best in class.

“The other obvious one is AI. And AI covers multiple different vectors. So, it's how technicians but also how their end customers are using AI.

“Are they using it responsibly or not? Where are they pushing their data? I think most of the population doesn't understand when they're using a natural language open AI engine where their data is going.

“And then it's leveraging AI for efficiency and effectiveness. And we also know, unfortunately, the bad guys are leveraging AI as well. And there's they're just upping the game as far as what they can do there.

“But I believe the good news is AI is more about a how than a what. That's more about driving all different elements of the business model to be more efficient, to be more effective and to be more secure.

“And when I think about the more of a what I look at more of security operations in this blending of IT operations and security operations.”

Jon Bartholomew, VP, channel sales

What message do you want partners to take away from this event?

“I’ve come in with a view on how we engage the mid-market through channel partners.

“N-able has predominantly been an MSP business for the last 20 plus years.

“As we start to build the cyber resilience story, as much as that’s relevant to the MSP, it’s also relevant to that mid-market space which we’ve never serviced properly before.”

What’s your top message to partners for 2025?

“For the MSPs, it’s not just looking at N-able as a platform RMM provider.

“We’ve transitioned that statement from RMM to unifying point management.

“It’s not just about RMM, it’s about how we secure endpoints.

“If you think about attacks and the more they become prevalent, it’s less about if something is going to happen, but when.

“Several years ago, the industry was all about detection and prevention. But if you have a breach that’s not going to help you.

“For an organisation to get back on their feet they need good remediation in place.

“So, for me it’s about ensuring you’re not just relying on that endpoint anymore, that you are looking at remediation and incident and response.”

What are some of the key market trends you’re seeing that are impacting your channel partners’ business the most?

“What our partners and distributors are saying to me collectively right now is that they are feeling marginalised by the vendors.

“Their ability to maintain profit with those vendors is decreasing significantly.

“Any view of incumbency margin or incumbency renewal protection is eroding, both at distributors and resellers.

“It started at distributor level about four years ago and now that’s merged into the reseller world as well.

“We’ve always seen how margins with distributors start to erode because as a distie establishes a business with a vendor there’s less for them to do.

“But the resellers are still expected to go and grow that business.

“So we’re seeing that margin erosion where partners are no longer able to make money on the renewal.

“That is the biggest feedback I’m getting on the market right now.

“The second is confusion.

“End users don’t understand which products to buy, and the buying process has changed.

“It went from vendors selling products to end users, to end users becoming much more intelligent and aware of what’s happening in the market and actually doing the research and knowing what they want to buy and why.

“To that no longer being possible because the option is so wide.

“So where do you go?

“So, looking to those resellers and asking what they’re buying?

“For a vendor it’s important to engage properly with that reseller.”

What's on your agenda in 2025?

“One is the launch of the new partner programme coming in May.

“It’s not just a new programme, it’s a complete change of go-to-market for N-able.

“The second is automation. Not just with the resell motion that’s also with MSPs as well.

“So MSPs that buy from distributors, it’s automating that process to make sure we’re easier to work with and slicker on how we do things.

“Our goal with automation is to reduce the non-revenue generating activities resellers have to do with any vendor, but specifically us.

“That means they become more profitable and sellers spend more time selling than doing admin.

“And the final thing is educating the market on cybersecurity.

“Not just the MSPs, but also the resellers’ understanding that N-able is not just an RMM solution, it’s a unified endpoint management back-up cybersecurity company.

What’s one goal you have for 2025?

“Establishing N-able as a cyber resilience company.

“And the second is to establish us as a full channel organisation.

“We’ve always been channel in terms of how we engage with MSPs, but we haven’t necessarily done that with the reseller motion.

“Most vendors built a reseller business and then added MSPs. Whereas we’ve done it the other way around.”

David Weeks, VP, partner experience

What message do you want partners to take away from this event?

“The answer is in the room.

“You have to work with your peers and align with your peers to learn and collaborate and that will drive opportunity growth.

“And for our partners, the biggest opportunity for growth is co-managed.

“There’s a downturn in internal IT. They're being let go. The budgets are being cut. They're begging for MSP to come and support them.”

What’s your top message to partners for 2025?

“They need to make the investment into more cyber resilience.

“We want them to be able to have that wrap-around service for their customers so that they're mitigating that risk for themselves and for their customers.”

What are some of the key market trends you’re seeing that are impacting your channel partners’ business the most?

“I think cyber is the most common.

“Obviously, that's a big one that is creating more opportunity.

“I think the more that we see compliance as-a-service as well and more regulations it changes it from a sell to a tell.

“Partners need to understand the regulations. A lot of them don’t.

“They have a broad understanding of it, but they don't leverage it as a sales opportunity to educate their end customer of why they need certain things.

“And then the second is that they can align with certain solutions, vendors, providers, whatever it might be, that can also create opportunity for them by bringing expertise into the end customer.”

What's on your agenda in 2025?

“Mine is to go out there and work with more partners to help them drive growth.

“That's really my mandate. I spend 80 per cent of my time on the road helping partners drive more opportunity.”

What’s one goal you have for 2025?

“One goal for me is to see this MSP market off level itself. I’d like to see them go out winning bigger and more business and moving up market into the mid-market and enterprise.”