N-able Empower 2025: Four partners reflect on their main takeaways
CRN hears from four N-able channel partners on what they thought of the event’s announcements
N-able is transforming into a cyber resiliency company and has urged its MSPs to knuckle down on this area to fortify their security operations - but what do the channel partners think?
This week CRN has been reporting live from Berlin, Germany at N-able’s annual partner conference, Empower 2025.
We heard from the vendor’s highest executives on their message to channel firms and where they would like to see partners investing.
Now we have wrapped on the event, CRN dispatches the reflections of four N-able channel partners.
Lee Robinson, co-founder & director, Meta Eagle
What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?
My biggest take away from the event is a combination of the new connections made but coupled with how they are facing similar challenges and opportunities.
No matter the size of the MSP, where they are located or how long they have been trading for there are parallels to be drawn.
From the need to enhance cyber defence capabilities, disaster recovery, or utilise automation to streamline the business. It is an exciting time to be in this space. Simply put there is going to be an ever growing demand for security focused MSP's that leverage technology.
What have you made of the event’s announcements from a partner perspective?
It's truly exciting to witness continuous growth and innovation. It’s encouraging to see the tools our engineers rely on being consistently improved and refined.
Not only is it inspiring to explore the upcoming product roadmaps, but it's also rewarding to see how these advancements and updates can be immediately applied within our operations at Meta Eagle.
Was there anything left out that you were expecting to hear about or any announcements that surprised you?
I was pleasantly surprised to hear about the cyber vulnerability scanning that is going to be included into the N-Sight and N-Central suite.
Being core to the business and deployed across the state that we support, I already have some applications in mind to assist how we present to our customers the threat landscape within their business
During his keynote David Weeks said: “There is enough business to go around for everyone.” What do you make of that statement? Do you agree or disagree?
I 100 per cent agree on this. We are in an age where every business, small, large, online or physical, relies on some form of IT for what they do. IT has become crucial for businesses to operate which is why they are frequently targeted.
With this in mind, I think it is important that every business has someone to manage their IT which means there is more than enough work to go around. The strong and innovative MSP's work together in more of a collaborative manner rather than seeing each other as competition.
During his keynote, CEO John Pagiluca said: “The number one thing that will help partners grow is security operations and cyber resilience. What do you make of this statement from your company’s perspective, and how N-able is supporting that?
Customers see their IT provider as responsible for their security and disaster recovery. so it is a very poignant statement.
It would make sense that we are in an age where security and cyber resilience are key, N-Able are supporting us to deliver on this with the addition of advance MDR in the form of Adlumin and adding security conscious aspects the the existing product base so from a Meta Eagle perspective they are helping us to achieve this and continually improve.
What do you make of N-able’s strategy and how it affects your business?
I see the strategy as continuing to advance, develop which affects our business as that is exactly what we are about at Meta Eagle.
Partnering with a technology provider means that we are bringing that provider into the Meta Eagle team and we all need to share the same vision to achieve goals.
What are some of the top challenges you’re facing at the moment?
The challenges at the moment faced by MSP's other than the technical landscape evolving are that of the market and economy.
Like every business, in the UK we are seeing the costs of running a business increasing, uncertainty in the market on a more global basis and logistical changes of procurement of equipment from the EU and US.
Sure, this affects us as a business, but it also affects our customers. Uncertainty can create a reluctance to spend which in turn can be counterproductive to growth.
Oliver Spence, CEO, CybaVerse
What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?
I think peer networking is still first and foremost. It also goes to sales and marketing for growth, but actually there's quite a lot of revenue you can get with each other in the room.
And then some other key areas are challenges and how MSPs go to market to get the right sort of clients on board.
What have you made of the event’s announcements from a partner perspective?
For us, we are quite focused on N-central from partnership and also moving on to Cove as well.
So for us, integrating that into our solution. We work with MSPs as well, so it's very important from that side.
I think they've got a lot of interesting aspects coming up. For us, it's pretty sort of getting into the Cove and N-central aspect at the moment.
During his keynote David Weeks said, “There is enough business to go around for everyone.” What do you make of that statement? Do you agree or disagree?
We’ve grown our business through partnerships, even with what you would consider as competitors.
We continue to do that. So, from what we see, the amount of attacks happening in the cyber space, or technology requirements, they're coming out businesses, there's still not enough resources.
An easy way to map this out is looking at the amount of untrained professionals there are in the IT security industry.
If you think, actually, there's lots of studies to say there are not enough people, then clearly there's not enough. But there's still plenty of revenue opportunities to share between businesses as well.
During his keynote, CEO John Pagiluca said: “The number one thing that will help partners grow is security operations and cyber resilience. What do you make of this statement from your company’s perspective, and how N-able is supporting that?
We focus on pen testing automation and compliance as well across the UK and cyber security.
We're very much aligned and completely agree on that statement.
MSPs have a job where they serve a lot of SME customers at the end of the day, and SMEs will turn to their IT provider to ask them for cybersecurity requirements and see them as the experts.
I think N-able are doing a good job in bringing the right providers, like us, like adding Adlumin into that mix to have conversations with them and say: ‘This is how we can enable you to deliver that cybersecurity to the SME market.”
What are some of the top challenges you’re facing at the moment?
Being on top of the market and seeing what’s happening.
There’s a lot of challenges around cybersecurity insurance.
A lot of the providers are dictating or stating that you have to have x, y, z, and even someone is going as far as to say that you have to have that with them as the provider.
From our perspective we are looking at cyber risk.
Paul Cashmore, co-founder, Solace Global Cyber
What were some of your biggest takeaways from the event?
The key thing to me is that they are accelerating the journey of end-to-end cyber resiliency to bring wider and richer integration.
What have you made of the event’s announcements from a partner perspective?
The launch of its vulnerability management feature for their UEM products, N‑central and N‑sight, architecturally that’s a massive change.
To be able to prioritise by severity, I think, is a real key milestone.
What I would like to see, though, is the rest of that infrastructure and assets, which is on their roadmap, be brought to market as soon as possible.
Because the name is not a replacement tool. But that is a good strategy in terms of where other partners are spending money on other tool sets.
During his keynote David Weeks said, “There is enough business to go around for everyone.” What do you make of that statement? Do you agree or disagree?
I think there is.
Where N-able have been in the last few years is they've been cross selling and expanding into the EDR, Adlumin, SentinelOne and Cove.
They’ve been making it easier for that partner to grow that revenue per customer from a better portfolio of products in the N-able stack.
If you can continue to add tangible products that people are using elsewhere, for the ease of the MSP, you want everything in one place because you've got much better integration and visibility all within that UI makes sense, because it is much more efficient for that MSP to have all their tools in one place.
Stephen Richardson, CEO, Digital Origin Solutions
What have been some of your biggest takeaways from the event?
My biggest takeaway is simply how open people and MSPs are to share insights into their business, how they do things and how they work.
There’s no competitiveness in the room.
And having the time to understand how things work and why they could benefit our business.
We've taken a big stance in security, and it’s done some sense checking for us in terms of we had an idea of what we're going to do, and we tier packaged our offering to our client base.
It's reassured us that what we were doing is correct. The products now make sense in what they're doing for us. And actually, at the point now where we've created a tiered product set which you don't need to be our client for us to go and sell it, you can be a totally new client and just take that piece.
During his keynote David Weeks said, “There is enough business to go around for everyone.” What do you make of that statement? Do you agree or disagree?
I totally agree with it.
We never tread on each other’s toes.
Everyone needs IT. There’s so much out there and there’s so many different flavours of what people need that you find your sweet spot.
During his keynote, CEO John Pagiluca said, “The number one thing that will help partners grow is security operations and cyber resilience. What do you make of this statement from your company’s perspective, and how N-able is supporting that?
I agree.
I'm in a world where, for four years I bought businesses and we grew for acquisition. I'm now owned by private equity and they want us to go and grow our own so we're gonna find a way of growing revenue.
Being able to take a product set which nobody's got a full grasp of yet, but you could lead is definitely the way into any of those places. It identifies a pain point they didn't know they had.
What are some of the top challenges you’re facing at the moment?
The thing I have the biggest problem with is that managed service is being driven to the ground, in terms of client expectation.
That's the thing you should be doing. Don’t me to pay more for it. That's the very least you should be doing.
And now you have to go on a technology journey with them to kind of show your value to them as a partner.
And so we have to go through a stage of automating simple processes so it removes the cost element to our business to keep performing on that without the revenue being there, because they don't pay any more money for the managed services.
And then upskilling our staff, so they become a more valuable sales tool to me.
I think there's going to be a big evolution in the not-too-distant future. The grind of client tickets and level one problems - if you don't automate them, I don't think you will survive this very well.