Derik Belair, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, N-able Technologies
Jul 28, 2009
July has been a busy month on the trade show front for N-able. We’ve made stops at several high-energy events, but few proved to be more exciting than RetailNOW 2009 in Las Vegas. We signed up for RetailNOW on advice from our colleagues at Autotask, and were told that the quality and quantity of service providers that attend was truly unique in our space.
Given that N-able attends some 40 events a year, we were skeptical that we would see many new faces, but boy were we wrong! The show itself was very educational and helped us get a much better handle on the unique and interesting retail vertical. We quickly discovered that retail service providers are dealing with many of the same business, operational and technical challenges as those faced by the IT service providers we work with every day at N-able.
Given that today’s POS equipment is IP enabled, the challenge for retail service providers is in monitoring and managing this equipment … sound familiar? So it should come as little surprise that attendees swarmed our booth, looking for answers on how our remote network and systems management software could help them. We spoke with 100 or so retail organizations and each one of them is keenly interested in playing a larger service provider role within their clients’ infrastructure.
N-able will be moving deeper into the retail space, and will explore additional verticals including health care, legal and a number of others. Having said that, we would like to get your feedback on which vertical you see the most growth opportunity in for managed services.