Empower 2022 Day 1: What it means to own the cloud

In day one of Empower 2022 we took the time to really dig deep into what we mean when we talk about Owning the Cloud. 

We looked at the strategic side in John Pagliuca’s presentation. Highlighting why our partners should want to Own the Cloud and the opportunities this brings for your businesses. Check out John’s blog, Owning the cloud is more than just a catchy headline, which goes into more detail. 

In short, the cloud brings you a lot of different capabilities: it brings elasticity and scalability through shared services, SaaS solutions, etc, versus on-premises solutions. On top of this it can help with the growing talent shortage in the MSP space. For example, there are applications that can allow you to manage front and back-office systems without potentially having to hire a human right away. Helping you to drive efficiencies in your business. Also, we can’t forget the continued opportunity in security. Even though the public cloud providers do much of this, there is still the opportunity for IT service providers to enhance security posture at the endpoint and at the point of interaction with the cloud. 

As a vendor, we’re also trying to make sure we bring you the right tools to allow you to manage, monitor, and monetize the cloud more efficiently. Mike Alder, our Chief Technical and Chief Product Officer, highlighted what we’ve already done to help our partners on their cloud journey as well some of the things we’ve got coming up in the product roadmap. For example, we’ve made investments in the acquisition of Spinpanel and the launch of Cloud User Hub, as well as Cloud Asset Manager and Microsoft 365 backup. 

The next piece of the cloud puzzle is security, which our CSO Dave Mackinnon spoke to in his presentation. While Azure or AWS may be doing elements of security, as I mentioned above, there are still connection points and end points that need to be secured, and these represent an opportunity for you to guide your customers and drive new revenue streams. Check out Dave’s blog on the 10 steps every business needs to take to start securing the cloud. 

Another big question for those starting out their cloud journey is as you build out your cloud services, how do you monetize them? And  as stated by John in his presentation, the answer is at this conference as we all collaborate together. 

Growing your business through M&A

Beyond that today’s breakout sessions in the afternoon continued a more traditional focus on getting the most out your N‑able services and building your businesses. Our M&A tracks,  with Davide di Labio our MSP Senior Sales Director, continue to draw people in and it’s clear that growth through acquisition or sale our of huge interest for our partners.

Making the most of the Head Nerds

And, of course, we’ve seen some great training from our Nerds. Some of the most popular ones included Stefanie Hammond’s Building Your Marketing Plan which also showcased our MarketBuilder program; Eric Harless’ Automating Backup Deployment, and Marc-Andre Tanguay’s Using custom properties effectively in N‑central.

 Creating a great culture

One of the key things that really differentiates N‑able is our internal culture and how that builds out to the way we work with our partners. Our chief people officer Kathleen Pai ran her track on how MSPs can create a world class culture and use that to drive business success. If you missed this and want to find out a bit more you can read Kathleen’s recent blog Putting your MSP customers first means putting your people first too, which touches on a lot of the same subjects.

We also need to give a mention to some of our vendor partners who held breakout sessions todays as well: Auvik, Liongard, Scalepad, and SentinelOne.

Meet the AllStars

Finally, we also announced our top 25 AllStar winners. If you’ve somehow managed to miss this, our AllStars program recognizes, encourages, and rewards partners who consistently show up for their success, by awarding them points for attending different N‑able activities, such as Office Hours, Bootcamps, Roadshows and Events etc. 

Here’s the top 25 in full… 

We’re looking forward to another great day tomorrow!

David Weeks is Senior Director, Partner Experience at N‑able