SolarWinds Seals N-able Deal

Last week, we brought you news that SolarWinds ‘planned’ to buy N-able for $120 million in cash. It didn’t take long to close the deal, as the pair today announced that everything is locked down and N-able is now officially part of SolarWinds.

The buyer tweaked the branding of the buyee, which will heretofore be known as N-able by SolarWinds. N-able will maintain its own website, marketing and sales and keep the essence of its brand.

The 13-year-old N-able brings with it a roster of some 2,600 MSPs who rely on its remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool N-Central.

SolarWinds intends to aim the N-able wares at a wide swath of customers, everyone from large enterprises to small shops that have little or no IT staffers in-house.

Small business, however, appears to be the sweet spot.

"As small businesses continue to turn to MSPs and other service providers to support their business-critical IT environments via the Cloud, we believe that we are now well-positioned to extend our unique value proposition to this growing space and support these businesses' evolving IT management needs. MSPs need a strong partner focused on delivering products that are powerful, affordable, and purpose-built to ensure that they are getting everything that they can out of their IT investments," said Kevin Thompson, SolarWinds' president and CEO.

SolarWinds Takes it to the RMM

SolarWinds believes that RMM is something a large portion of the MSP community wants and needs. After looking at an array of vendors, the company concluded that N-able provided the best fit. “The RMM market is characterized by a large number of MSPs who need powerful, easy to use, and affordable solutions for solving a well-understood set of problems in order to run their businesses effectively and profitably, while serving hundreds of thousands of SMBS,” SolarWinds said. “The RMM market is also characterized by a fragmented set of competitive vendors offering outdated go-to-market approaches. We believe that these factors present us with the strong opportunity for commoditization that we look for when entering new markets.”

SolarWinds itself offers network management, as well as help desk, patch management, application management, mobile management, security and systems management.

The company, before adding in N-able, has more than 75,000 customers.

TMC recently talked to N-able. Check out this TMC video interview.