Frank Colletti on N‑Able Growth (EP 991)

[0:18] Podcast. We are here in Fort Lauderdale at the lovely brand new Omni Hotel,

[0:26] enjoying a wonderful day and a wonderful conference. We are here at Empower 2026, hosted by N-Able. And yes, the N-Able that I sometimes tell you guys that I use. It is my RMM. It has been my RMM since before it was N-Able, back when it was in the days of GFI. Ooh, hound dog. That voice you hear, folks, Frank Colletti, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at N-Able. Frank, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. So first question I got to ask, you're a Canada guy, right? That's correct. So how often do you make it down to South Florida? You know, I'm a Miami Dolphins fan. Oh, really? I am. How did that happen? Well, it's cold there and warm here. Yes. And it was the year that Dan Marino decided he was going to kind of retire. So it's been downhill ever since. I know we're in a rebuild again this year. So I'm hoping for someday we have a great team. But I actually make it down quite a bit and just enjoy it down here. Nice. Great weather. Yeah. Weather's good. Football team. Looked like it was going to rain a little bit this morning but held out. You got any beach time scheduled?

[1:41] Fortunately, I really wish I did. I probably would hit the links if I had some time. Oh, there you go. Golf guy. Lots of those around here. All right. So let's go ahead. And I know that we don't have a ton of time.

[1:54] So let me grab as much information from you as I can. And so Empower 26, I know, is about business resilience this year. You guys are doing a lot of things when it comes to cyber threats. Of course, we're talking AI, a lot of things here. Uh, there's a couple of different tracks for MSP owners. Um, you had friends of mine, Don and Dave Sizer here talking about their little ticket triage that they had to work through. Uh, what has been pretty much the main focus for you guys this year? Look, Empower is really about the channel. It's about meeting our partners and our partners are MSPs, value added resellers, distributors. It's about getting us all together in a very intimate setting, um, and trying to work through the challenges and trends that are happening in the market. And just little examples, like you described this, the conversations that are happening in the hallway, trying to understand different use cases. Um, and that's what I look forward to. Uh, I've been doing it quite a while and I am surprised at the content that I get back every time. So I've become very good at asking questions and I'm extracting. And what I do is I try to solve people's problems and then take back to the shop. Hey, we got these great ideas, how are we going to solve these problems?

[3:09] So it's really exciting. And you know, you hit on a couple of things, some of our key messages and things that we're delivering. I mean, they're not just messages for us. It's what we do. We believe in a business resilience is about keeping businesses up and running. It's making sure they're ready.

[3:24] For a situation that is going to occur from a cyber-attack at some point and so when you look at our portfolio from our RMM products protecting customers before an attack our Adlumin security operations product during the attack and then our cove product after the attack it's really the coming together of these three um components that are giving our customers business resilience and then we're walking the floor and everyone's saying hey what are we going to do is it this this ai thing i remind them i say it's artificial intelligence it's all helping us right to automate and get ahead of it because the world is moving in a in a very fast pace yeah it is it is so i mentioned at the top here that I’ve been with you guys for quite some time you of course were actually here way before then uh going back to what is it 2005 or 2003 2003 okay and um so You were there before the acquirement of GFI, which is what the platform I was on. So I've stayed the course. And a lot of people look at the product that we're on. Of course, it's got the RMM, it's got the patching, it's got the web filtering.

[4:37] Bitdefender’s tied in, Sentinel-1 integration now. I'll be honest, I haven't paid attention to the AI portion inside of N-Able. So where is that going to go in terms of what we will see as MSPs? So what you'll see is it's already started. So we introduced vulnerability management and additional patch management into the inside platform that you're using. And right in there, in the assets view, when you log into assets view, you will see Enzo, our new AI agentic co-worker working alongside you. Natural language for you to interact with, to automate, to start working with and extracting data. And all you really need to be on is the latest release, which you will be because you're on Insight, and you can start leveraging Enzo. And we're pretty ecstatic because it's in...

[5:27] Release right now and our customers could take full advantage of it all right I’m going to have to click down past i usually stay the first three buttons on the left i need to i need to scroll down a little more you're going to need to move over and get into the assets view specifically for you to see that actually I’ve been in there but i look at it and i look at it as an inventory thing I’m like yeah all right I’ll just go back to the main dashboard and you've got updated patching in there you got Linux patching you got uh mac patching all in the same in the same views that you have.

[5:56] So it's part of our investments. And I think what's interesting about our UEM products is that as everything leads towards security, looking at the UEM as really the control plane and managing all of the endpoints, the devices and the users, and then looking at the next layer, which would be the action plane. How do I take action on things that I'm actually seeing? And more and more of it is focused on security. So from our standpoint, it's evolving the current monitoring and management capabilities that we have, but extending it from a security standpoint, right? So with all the stuff we've just talked about...

[6:32] It's nice to talk about what's coming, how do we deal with it, but are you having conversations with people about how to actually integrate it into their service catalog, how to add things in terms of, you know, stack and pricing and things of that nature? Are they asking you those questions? Yeah, they are. I mean, that's what's amazing about Empower. We have a lot of breakout sessions. Our head nerds, if you've not heard who our head nerds are, they are the gurus of their particular topics.

[7:00] Sales and marketing is a track. Microsoft is a track. Data protection, security, UEM. Those conversations are happening in those breakout sessions. And there's multiple ones that are happening here. And why they're powerful is because it's peer-to-peer. The peers, many of them are on stage with our nerds. They're working through use cases that we've solved. And then we have our solution engineers here as well. And they're working through problem statements. So we learn a lot. We take that back. And then, okay, how do we automate that? We put a lot of that knowledge back into N-Able Me and N-Able University so people could then, we could use that globally in a much broader scale and leverage what people have actually taught us at these events.

[7:47] I'm going to do a sidebar here. You look a little excited. And after being involved with this company for as many years as you can have, how are you still so excited about stuff? Well, it's fascinating to me that after 23 years in this space, that, the opportunity for MSPs for vendors all of our sponsors is continuing to grow when i joined i didn't think that was the case i have many colleagues walking the floors MSPs that either they've sold their businesses started new businesses bought multiple businesses and they're thriving and it's a great community they're helping small businesses keep their businesses up and running it's personable i know them they've got my cell phone number we keep in touch, uh, ran into one of my, you give partners your cell phone number. I do. Come on. I do. We do. I had so many, they're texting me. Where are you? Come to the bar. I'm like, well, I'm busy doing podcasts and talking to my partners. I'll come see you shortly.

[8:48] So, um, no, so that, that, I think that's, what's exciting is that that opportunity is always there. And, mentally um it's very challenging and i thrive on that i thrive on building things i mean cyber security was one thing now tied into ai it creates a whole new set of possibilities, and how do we help this community there's 25 000 partners of ours how do we help them thrive globally it's not just in the us or in Canada i mean we're talking uh throughout the globe in Australia south Africa all parts of Europe and so working with these different channel partners dealing with, uh, their challenges really excites me.

[9:27] So you talked about this being global and you guys move in power around all the time.

[9:33] So, uh, you guys were in Europe last year. I mean, the last time I saw you guys, I think it was out in Texas. Um, so you're here in Fort Lauderdale. Is there a different flavor here than you've gotten in the past events? Um, we have a great mix. Um, we have a, I think, you know, if I look at the mix of people around the globe, we've got probably a similar breakout. Each year it's a little bit different, but Empower has gotten, this is our 10th year of Empower. We have gotten such great feedback that we're actually taking Empower on the road. So we'll be having Empowers and some of these other geographies that we have. So we can share more of this. We can have more of those intimate peer-to-peer conversations, have more of our business transformation events with them. And so we're going to take Empower on the road. Um, and, uh, that'll be for 2020, uh, for 2026. So when you say on the road, are you talking about doing like road shows that are a little smaller community? Okay. We will have one big event a year and then that way we can just reach more partners.

[10:36] Hear what's happening in their local environments and then be able to take it back. Nice. Which is an amazing thing. We'll be announcing that tomorrow. Okay. All right. So, yeah, just to let people know, you're my first interview here, the head nerds that you mentioned, I get them a little bit later today. Okay. So I'll meet all of them. Oh, wow. That's a great group. It should be interesting. Yeah. I have questions. Yeah, I know. And they'll have answers. Make sure you time yourself. Yeah. No, but they're great. They have such knowledge. They're such experts in helping our customers solve problems.

[11:10] And it's worked out very well for us. And you know what? They're on the front lines and they're learning. They're saying, okay, some customers are like, how do I do this?

[11:17] We're like, we should probably build that or we should do that. Go off, back to the shop and pull that together for them. Right. So I know we talked about the different business tracks, the technical tracks, AI and cybersecurity. Let me ask you, if you were to be asked the question, what's the one thing? That I should take away from this event? Do you have one thing in mind? I think that N-Able is always thinking about MSPs, always thinking about the channel. What's next? How do they monetize? How do they protect their SMBs? We're a vendor that cares about the community.

[11:56] And that's just, you know, that speaks, it speaks to our actions speak volumes for how we do that. And I think we've carried that forward And I think it's, cornerstones of our success in our business and um we have great technology is great but you also have to have great people that care and people that are going to work with you to make that work properly all right okay so you didn't give me any guardrails so I’m going to ask this question you can choose to answer or not okay but i know that you've been through all of the ins and outs of the acquisitions the sales the IPO’s and all of that so of course a lot of that is still happening with a lot of the vendors in the channel anything happening with N-Able, look we're a publicly traded company yeah um we're always you know talking uh globally um and we're always excited to explore different technologies um we're always inquisitive we're looking for new ways that we can expand our business uh so from our perspective is how do we do better by our partners and how do we find new technologies that we can bring in I was going to say, it's about time for you guys to buy somebody. Well, we have Lumen integration, which has been a fantastic way for us to get into security operations. And that's worked itself out very well.

[13:15] And absolutely, it's something that we want to do. Our partners always, they're not shy to tell us, look at this company and look at that company. And that's something that we're definitely doing. Okay. Yeah. All right. I should let people know that one of the things of where they put us, you've got a view overlooking the Intracoastal. My boat is out there. What do you think of that? How come we're not doing it there? We should have been doing it. Listen, I just took whatever space they gave me. All right. I probably should have offered that. Well, it's a beautiful place. Probably because everybody would have wanted to be there. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a great point. All right.

[13:55] Was that the finger? We're good? It's okay good for time yeah this is this is doing a show live folks so I’ve got the uh, the executives over on the side letting me know how much time we have so looks like we're good here um so in terms of let's do one more ai thing um, so ai in the sock is pretty much what a lot of us are looking at you talked about the ways that We'll see it inside of our dashboard and stuff.

[14:28] What about how N-Able is guiding partners on how to deal with their clients and helping them implement their own AI? Yeah, this is a fascinating question. I've been asking a lot of, we've been doing a lot of one-on-ones and asking them, how are your customers engaging with you?

[14:47] And to be honest, a lot of them, many of them have said, hey, we're looking at it internally. How do we automate? How do we use AI within our business to help streamline our service offering, get higher MPS scores and working with our customers? There is a lot of debate right now on how to monetize that, on how to bring that into the business. Many small and medium businesses still haven't figured out how to do that, what they're going to do. But what is happening is that their kids and all generations are leveraging AI right now. So it's actually being widely adopted. Um, and so it's going to be a matter of a very short order before people start saying, okay, how do I, um, how do I start protecting myself? How do I make sure that we don't have, you know, rogue agents or things that are affecting my data out there. And so it's a journey and, and, and that's what we're doing with our community is just trying to understand how to, how to do that the right way. So when, so what a lot of them are doing is having those proactive, uh, consultations with them and talking to them when they're going.

[15:51] Quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews and introducing, hey, here's your options. Here's the things that are probably happening within your business. Some of the more advanced ones are actually delivering solutions out there. They're testing different ways to enhance their offering, which I find quite interesting. Some of the approaches that they're taking, but given everything

[16:12] AI in six months from now, it's probably going to be a little bit different. Yep, it is. It is. All right. Last question. You joined in 2003.

[16:21] Account executive at the time. That's correct. Did you imagine yourself sitting here as the executive vice president, chief revenue officer, talking about all these things? I did not expect to be at N-Able after 23 years doing this role. I always had ambitions to be in the role that I'm in, but I'm so privileged to be able to work with great people at N-Able, our executive team, most importantly, our partners. When I come to these events, that's for me, I get excited. They asked me to be the emcee, and I was joined by Chris Massey and Enzo, our new AI agent on stage with me. We're three emcees today, and it's just great to see everybody leaning in on that and taking advantage of that and just having a great time with it. All right. Well, Frank, thank you very much for stopping by. Thank you for all that you've done over the years at N-Able.

[17:15] I'm still here. I'm still a partner. Love it. Great to hear. Where things are going that you are and uh nice to finally meet you we should have done this sooner but uh thank you very much thank you and enjoy the rest of the show all right appreciate it that's it folks I’ll be back uh more with head nerds and others here at empower 2026 we'll see you soon Holla!