MOST BUSINESSES APPRECIATE the importance of customer satisfaction. NinjaRMM has no choice in the matter. A still-young contender in a mature and crowded market, the RMM software maker has to fight its way into almost every account it wins.
“”I’d say 98% of the sales we get, they’re using another product,”” says Sal Sferlazza (pictured), NinjaRMM’s CEO. “”There’s a lot of vendors that do what we do.””
The company must be getting something right, though. Founded in 2013, it entered 2020 with over 4,000 partners, about twice as many as it had just 12 months earlier.
Sferlazza gives Ninja’s MSP-friendly policies and “”white glove”” service partial credit for those results. Pricing is on a predictable per-device, per-month basis with no contracts or added fees. Newcomers to the platform get personalized onboarding assistance at no extra cost, and free all-you-can-eat training for as long as they need it.
“”At any given time, if new technicians come on in the organization, they can reach out and ask for help,”” Sferlazza says.
Support, which also costs nothing, is another point of emphasis. Ninja’s median response time to the 18,000 tickets it addressed last year was 22 minutes, and its average customer satisfaction score with that assistance was over 98%. Furthermore, support personnel are encouraged to pass customer feedback along to developers regularly—and empowered to make sure that feedback gets reflected quickly in Ninja’s code.
“”Support has a lot of authority in our organization,”” Sferlazza says.
It’s just one of several ways developers learn about partner needs, alongside online resources and direct interaction with users. “”We probably get 50 to 100 feature requests a week,”” says Sferlazza, who adds that building as many of those as possible into the platform quickly is one of the ways Ninja strives to set itself apart. “”We take feature requests seriously,”” he says.
Everyone’s a Product Manager
The company takes pretty much everything about its core product seriously, in fact. “”The culture is that everyone’s a product manager,”” says Sferlazza. That attitude flows from the top, he continues. A developer for 17 years before transitioning into management, Sferlazza is Ninja’s chief product officer in addition to its CEO. Even more than its concierge customer service, he contends, that product-focused mindset is what accounts for the vendor’s swift growth.
“”We win on product first,”” he says.
Sferlazza points to the system’s intuitive interface, which provides single-pane-of-glass access to endpoint information, as a top reason users like it. “”That’s the low-hanging fruit that everyone always talks about,”” he says. But the platform has additional strengths, he argues, from its extensive automation functionality and remediation tools, which shorten ticket resolution times, to its scalable, “”born in the cloud”” architecture.
“”We have partners successfully running over 20,000 endpoints in our platform,”” Sferlazza says. “”We’re a true scale-out SaaS platform.””
RMM software is all Ninja makes, so it relies on integrations with third parties to support the complete tool stacks that MSPs need to operate efficiently. Security partners include Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, and Webroot; StorageCraft and MSP360 (formerly CloudBerry Lab) are top BDR allies; and supported PSA tools include ConnectWise Manage and Datto’s Autotask PSA. Users can employ TeamViewer or Splashtop to remote into endpoints, and can document their work in Kaseya’s IT Glue solution or SolarWinds Passportal.
Alternatively, of course, they could source all their tools from one supplier. ConnectWise, Datto, Kaseya, and SolarWinds are all assembling preintegrated suites of managed services systems these days, with help from deep-pocketed private equity investors. Sferlazza insists that trend has yet to hurt Ninja, though.
“”I think in some ways it might’ve helped us,”” he says. “”[MSPs] like that we’re independent.””
Being independent isn’t keeping the company from investing in its future, however. “”Our engineering team now is bigger than our entire company was just two years ago,”” Sferlazza says. “”We’ve got a good thing going, and we don’t want that experience to atrophy.””
