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After months of talking about ways to survive the recession, I had a refreshing conversation with Gavin Garbutt, president and CEO of N-able, about ways VARs and MSPs can prepare to flourish as the economy begins to rebound in 2010. Only a few weeks ago, at its own partner summit, N-able launched a program that provides its partners with tools to help wedge open the doors of potential customers – did I mention these were free tools?

According to Garbutt, the idea behind this promotion is to encourage partners to see the light at the end of the tunnel because he believes that when customers get their feet back under them, they will need trusted advisors, need a plan to catch up on technology that bypassed them during the spending freeze of the last year, and need a partner to help them upgrade their network slowly and steadily.

To help open the door, N-able is offering its partners, along with its professional licenses, two free associate licenses for an agent that they can deploy in a potential customer's network, allowing the services provider to assess the network, sniff out potential problems, and make educated recommendations to that potential customer. In addition, the vendor is offering two free endpoint security solution bundles to each partner, again, for deployment with a potential customer. The idea, says Garbutt, is that once you get inside, you can then gather information about the customer's environment, make educated suggestion and help that customer prepare for what needs to be done with the money starts to flow.

Garbutt and I laughed about how he thrilled he was that one major theme of the keynote speech by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, was the idea of giving one product away for free to drive sales of another related product. Anderson provided as an example the branding of Jell-O. When introduced decades ago, no one knew what Jell-O was, so the company needed to raise awareness.

To do that, according to Anderson, the company gave away free cookbooks filled with recipes using Jell-O. Then, as housewives read the recipes and got excited about those recipes, they went out and bought Jell-O. Free leads to sales. The same idea is behind the N-able move. The software they are giving away provides a wedge into a new customers network, starts an MSP down the path to trusted advisor, and positions the MSP for sales and a SLA as the cash starts to flow again in the next 12 to 18 months. I'll be interested to see the results as they evolve the next few months.

Listen as Garbutt outlines the N-able offering.