SolarWinds MSP, the managed services software maker responsible for parent company SolarWinds Worldwide LLC‘s former SolarWinds N-able and LOGICnow units, plans to roll out a series of enhancements in the next few months aimed at capitalizing on synergies between its two previously separate product lines.
Company executives provided specific examples scheduled to reach market between now and April at the vendor’s MAX 2016 partner event, currently underway in Edinburgh, Scotland. As ChannelPro reported yesterday, SolarWinds MSP has been using that conference as an opportunity to ease anxieties about past changes while sharing plans for the future.
By the end of this year, users of MSP Remote Management (RM), the LOGICnow RMM solution known until October as MAX Remote Management, will be free to use N-able’s MSP Connect product to take remote control of client endpoints in addition to the TeamViewer solution many of them use for that purpose now, resulting in greater flexibility and enhanced redundancy should one or the other solution be unavailable. LOGICnow forbearer GFI Software sold TeamViewer to U.K.-based Permira Holdings Ltd. in 2014.
Similarly, the next edition of MSP N-central, which was previously called SolarWinds N-able N-central, will integrate with LOGICnow’s BDR system, now officially called MSP Backup & Recovery.
“That is a really good example of the type of value that SolarWinds MSP can bring to the table with a combined technology portfolio,” says senior vice president of sales and customer operations JP Jauvin.
The new MSP N-central release, version 11, is slated to ship before the close of 2016.
In the first quarter of 2017, MSP RM will add tighter integration with MSP Manager, the PSA system introduced by the former SolarWinds N-able in January.
MSP RM users will gain additional capabilities not imported from N-able products early next year as well, including administrative support for printers and network devices such as routers and firewalls and the ability to create, customize, and monitor filtered views of devices under management. That latter feature will enable technicians to quickly see all devices on a particular operating system that failed a backup check in the last week, for example, rather than repeatedly search for such endpoints.
Arriving next year after Q1 are a new anti-ransomware solution and new site monitoring functionality. The anti-ransomware package will combine elements of SolarWinds MSP’s endpoint protection and BDR solutions to provide both prevention and remediation capabilities for today’s most rampant, high-profile security threat.
“I’m hoping to bring that to market in the first half of ’17,” said SolarWinds MSP general manager John Pagliuca in an interview with ChannelPro yesterday.
The site monitoring feature will draw on products from the larger SolarWinds corporate family, such as SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, to give MSPs a view of customer environments that spans beyond endpoints to encompass applications and wired or wireless LANs as well.
“What you always struggle with as an MSP is to see the whole picture,” says SolarWinds MSP senior director of partner community and field marketing Dave Sobel. Site monitoring will help technicians more precisely determine the source of issues not caused by faulty servers, laptops, or routers.
The integrations among SolarWinds MSP products announced this week and coming in the next few months are the leading edge of a more extensive set of inter-solution connections due next year and beyond. Future editions of the company’s risk intelligence and endpoint security solutions, for example, could be equipped to collaboratively apply stricter policy controls to servers and PCs containing especially sensitive information. If one of those devices gets infected, SolarWinds MSP’s endpoint security and BDR systems could work together to suspend backup services, so malware doesn’t get protected along with legitimate customer data.
Capabilities like those will separate SolarWinds MSP from its competition, according to Steve Rodda, vice president of product management, strategy, research, and development for MSP RM.
“Everyone has the pieces and parts. For us it’s about gluing it all together and providing a seamless experience now,” he says. “When you get risk intelligence talking to anti-virus and anti-virus talking to backup, this is where things actually start to get really exciting.”
MAX 2016 concludes later today.
