NinjaRMM’s Partner Program Seeing ‘Rocket Ship’ Growth

With an increasing number of channel partners and sales thanks to its new partner program, NinjaRMM’s next focus is to expand the program into more geographic areas and add more security features, Dean Yeck, the company’s chief revenue officer, tells CRN.

After launching its inaugural partner program one year ago, NinjaRMM is seeing explosive channel growth and recently expanded the program into new markets to boost its global reach.

“We’ve learned a ton over the last year and especially during the year of the pandemic. We’ve learned what was working well, and we certainly learned areas that we needed to recalibrate as things are starting to open back up,” said Dean Yeck, chief revenue officer of NinjaRMM. “There’s a lot of growth. It’s a really exciting rocket ship to be a part of.”

The remote monitoring and management software company’s NinjaRMM Partner Program relies heavily on its customer relationships and in-house experts to drive sales. However, with an increasing number of channel partners and sales thanks to its new partner program, NinjaRMM’s next focus is to expand the program into more geographic areas and add more security features.

NinjaRMM has 6,000 global partners, up from 4,000 over the same period last year, with 2.5 million endpoint users across all partners.

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Earlier this month, the company launched its 5.2 platform update that improves end-user security by allowing the customer to uninstall NinjaRMM from a devic­e to prevent data loss during a security breach. It also allows MSPs and IT departments to easily codify information that they manage.

“Even though we’re not purely in the security space, we’re security-adjacent and it’s hard to have a really good security process without something like Ninja in the portfolio to assure hygiene of the software,” Yeck said.

Jason Danner, managing director at Aerorock, a New Zealand-based MSP in New Zealand, has been using NinjaRMM’s products since 2015 and said NinjaRMM’s security features and its intuitive interface are what differentiates it from competitors.

“What gives peace of mind to our end users is their trust in us to do the due diligence and have confidence in the security of the products we use,” Danner told CRN via email. “In a modern era where an MSP’s remote monitoring and management tools are a common vector of attack, our confidence in the security and reliability of these tools is paramount. The Ninja team has always led with a security focus. When issues crop up they communicate with their partners quickly and transparently.”

NinjaRMM’s base-level security hygiene also includes multifactor authentication (MFA), according to Yeck.

“If you have nothing but MFA, you’re going to be much more secure than if you don’t have MFA,” he said. “Forcing that hygiene in our customer portfolio is a super important step. If you get your password taken away that ends up in the dark web somewhere, they don’t have your device, they just have your password so that’s why MFA is so important. It’s really critical for Ninja to get fully functional on enforcing MFA functionality across all of our customers, and we’ve done that in the last year.”

NinjaRMM, which recently moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, is also focused on expanding markets and customer relationships through partners.

In the last quarter it put people on the ground in Australia and added more partners in Canada and Berlin.

“We want our VARs to have the same hand-holding experience that our customers get. We focus on ease of use and enablement for our customers and we want that same feeling for our partners. We’re investing heavily in resources and co-marketing materials and technical support for our resellers,” said Yeck.

“Maybe they have a great presence in a certain area or maybe in a certain vertical. That‘s really the next evolution of our program,” he said. “We want to focus on those resellers because we know from experience they are the trusted advisers of our customers. They have the relationships, they may have worked with them for years and they’ve got the trust of customers.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Yeck has seen some of NinjaRMM’s MSPs grow significantly as the ability to deploy remote device functionality was crucial. While many offices are opening back up, and with the rise in ransomware attacks, security is still paramount to the company’s business.

“That‘s a trend that is only getting more and more high end,” he said. “A lot of what we do helps facilitate that. Customers will look at us as far as patch management. With Ninja’s platform we’re able to see if those devices are up to date.”