News | August 14, 2013

N-able's New Report Manager Makes It Easier For MSPs To Quantify, Communicate And Visually Demonstrate IT Services Business Value

Source: Solarwinds MSP

Next Generation Business Reporting Tool Features Powerful Executive Summary Reports and “Glance-and-Know” Graphics for Greater Visibility Across the Managed Network

Ottawa, Canada – August 14, 2013 – N-able, a global leader in remote monitoring and management (RMM) and service automation software, today launched Report Manager 4.1 to deliver industry-leading business reporting to N-able managed service provider (MSP) partners worldwide. Highlighting the new release is a powerful new executive summary report designed to transform and simplify the way MSPs quantify, communicate and visually demonstrate the business and technical value of their services to customers, prospects and other influencers such as line of business owners and board of directors.

Now available as an optional module for N-able’s N-central® RMM and MSP service automation platform, Report Manager 4.1 ships with more than 50 ready-to-use strategic and executive-level reports that offer high-value insight into key performance indicators (KPIs), IT infrastructure and devices under management. The new software also showcases the success of specific IT initiatives, investments and priorities such as cost savings, new infrastructure and overall enhancements to business availability.

“Today’s MSPs are facing increased competition from all sides as new players enter the market, which is putting more pressure on them than ever before to demonstrate business value and the need for IT expenditure to customers and prospects,” says JP Jauvin, N-able’s general manager. “The enhancements we’ve made within Report Manager 4.1 were developed from the feedback of our partners worldwide and designed to further simplify business reporting. With this next generation reporting tool, we’ve made it easier for our MSP partners to visually represent the totality of their services and the impact on the business, while giving them greater flexibility and granularity into the areas that matter most to their customers.”

Innovative Glance-And-Know Scorecard Design

N-able’s Report Manager is the only reporting solution that is fully integrated with a leading RMM and MSP service automation platform at both the data and user interface level. Another differentiating factor is the tool’s highly intuitive design and an executive summary report that captures key metrics and summarizes them in a “glance-and-know” scorecard-style format. The result is that MSPs can more easily articulate and visually show high-value information such as network availability or year-to-date savings comparisons in seconds, without the need for executive-level customers to get bogged down in details.

The summary reports are populated with bright and instantly clear gauges that quickly summarize key information including the overall performance score for all activities presented -- benchmarked against previous scores to quickly track gains or losses. KPIs are captured in key areas of the customer’s business including asset management; security monitoring; and performance of servers, workstations and laptops.

“Report Manager 4.1 generates professional and comprehensive business reports that we’re proud to give our customers,” says Peter Clarke, director, LanDynamix, a Johannesburg, South Africa MSP and one of the first N-able partners to test-drive the new reporting tool. “The length of the reports, their look and feel, and the information they provide is ideal – even without customization – for customers in finance, operations and other non-technical areas of the business to quickly see what’s going on in their IT environments.”

“The new release has already opened the door to new opportunities for LanDynamix by pinpointing issues that we are not yet managing with N-central,” adds Clarke. “With Report Manager, we go in and present the need and make the business case, and then our customers simply tell us to ‘take care of it.’ In addition, Report Manager 4.1 provides information on warranty expirations and other critical IT issues to help us add more value to the customer relationship.”

Highly Customizable Reports

With report templates in three categories including managed assets, managed IT services and managed security, N-able’s Report Manager 4.1 is highly customizable. Designed to be easy-to-use, the reporting solution features pre-built and pre-configured modules that can be dragged and dropped onto the design canvas and re-used across reports. Granularity of reporting is also controllable by the MSP, with content that can be based on customer, date, device class, service type and other variables.

Report output types are configurable for HTML, PDF, XLS, CSV or even email, and can be delivered to end customers via a branded format or a network share.  In addition, N-able offers an archival function for storing five years or more of data, making Report Manager 4.1 ideal for MSPs targeting financial services and other industries where archiving and regulatory compliance are essential.

Report Manager Builds Upon N-able’s Top-Rated PSA Integration

Professional service automation (PSA) software integration continues to be a competitive advantage for Report Manager, and the new release includes a new ticket summary report – featuring a single, standardized view of all proactive and reactive tickets from a centralized management console. The software builds upon N-able’s integration with two leading PSA providers, Autotask and ConnectWise, offering award-winning PSA workflows that dynamically pull key hardware, software and network metrics from all tickets into a single, easy-to-scan, standardized report for fast analysis.

The new release is also equipped with a “managed devices vs. time report” that provides a time frame and summary to quantify all changes in the network environment each month. The report automates the manually-intensive task of matching up billing against devices and against all activities including tickets issued by Autotask and ConnectWise.

Report Manager 4.1 also comes with a new network assessment report, which offers a complete asset inventory for all devices associated with N-able’s Essential and Professional licenses; and an AV report, which issues reports on the status of all customer antivirus (AV) solutions across the network – regardless of the vendor -- to provide a complete picture of system health and deliver critical insight into updated and outdated AV status, as well as whether AV scanning is enabled or disabled.

“With the network assessment report built right into Report Manager, MSPs simply drop in a probe, run the report and get 99 percent of the information they need to demonstrate immediate value to a potential new SMB client,” says Jauvin. “In addition, the ‘managed devices vs. time report’ is an invaluable audit report that quantifies all changes over any time frame in the SMB network, and leverages automation to reduce MSP technician time and expedite processes.”

Report Manager 4.1 reports on data collected from N-able’s Essential and Professional licenses to give MSPs the flexibility to meet their SMB customers’ needs at all stages of IT adoption and achieve 100 percent market coverage.

MSPs and IT resellers interested in becoming an N-able partner, please visit our MSP Partner Program web page or contact 1-877-655-4689 ext. 331 or +00 800 6225 3000 ext. 331.

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About N-able

N-able is the leading global provider of complete IT management and automation solutions for managed service providers (MSPs). N-able Technologies was acquired by SolarWinds®, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, in May 2013. N-able’s award-winning N-central® is the industry’s #1 RMM and MSP Service Automation PlatformN-able has a proven track record of helping MSPs standardize and automate the setup and delivery of IT services in order to achieve true scalability. N-central is backed by the most comprehensive business enablement support services available today and the industry’s only freemium licensing model. Thousands of MSPs use N-able solutions to deliver scalable, flexible, profitable managed services to over 88,000 SMBs worldwide. With offices in North America, the U.K., the Netherlands and Australia, N-able is 100% channel-friendly and maintains strategic alliances with a number of leading global IT companies, including Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco among others. www.n-able.com.

Source: Solarwinds MSP