Daumard talks with ChannelBuzz about why he thinks NinjaRMM is well positioned to do well in a crowded marketplace – and just how he intends to do that.
Francois Daumard, CRO at NinjaRMM
San Francisco-based NinjaRMM is one of the newer entrants in the RMM space, looking to differentiate itself in a crowded market with a new and state of the art platform and by emphazing customer service and being easy for MSPs to do business with. In June, they hired their first Chief Revenue Officer, channel veteran Francois Daumard, whose resume includes stints as Vice President of Global Channel Sales at AVG and Vice President, Channels – North America at IBM.
“The Chief Revenue Officer position was newly created because Ninja is at the point where it is accelerating its growth,” Daumard told ChannelBuzz. “There was no reason for Ninja to have a CRO before now. We have reached an alignment of timing and growth, and recently reached a milestone of 1200 partners. We are now almost a mature company that needs to accelerate growth. That is my expertise – taking companies to the next level.”
NinjaMSP came out of the gate looking to differentiate itself as a pure play RMM provider, but which integrates easily to everyone else. They also looked to be easier to do business with. Those philosophies remain core to the company, even as it grows, Daumard said.
“The RMM space is packed, and at the end of the day, all solutions pretty much do the same thing, manage PCs and servers remotely,” he stated. “The experience MSPs have is, however totally different. This is what the company was built around.”
“We are the only RMM in Silicon Valley and that’s important,” he noted. We get SaaS. We are surrounded here by SaaS companies and we understand the model. We also do not have a platform built in the 20th century that we are trying to upgrade. It was built in the 21st century with the SaaS model in mind. That makes a big difference.”
Daumard said that NinjaRMM has a differentiating view towards providing support.
“We do not consider support as being a cost,” he said. “If you do that, you will want to find ways to slash that cost. You start looking for ways to shave cost, and the experience for partners will always decrease. For us, it is not a cost but part of our model. We provide free and unlimited support. We know that some others do as well, but we do not build the cost of the support into our prices.”
NinjaRMM has the same philosophies with onboarding and contracts.
“We offer onboarding which is free, but which is also unlimited, so the MSP gets taken care of properly,” Daumard said. “The onboarding stage in some other companies can be ‘checking the box.’ That is not how we operate. We also don’t have any contracts. We think that is a thing from the past. It’s a SaaS world, and locking up partners for as many years as possible, as many other RMM vendors do, belongs in the past. We don’t do business like this. The result is that our experience is different, and the level of satisfaction is higher than the competition.
“Our goal is also to provide the best account management in the industry,” Daumard said. “Other companies put a lot of effort of energy and time into recruiting partners, but once they are in, they don’t see the vendor any more. We want this to be the beginning of the relationship, a relationship not only with the product but with us as a company.”
Daumard said that another differentiation is that the NinjaRMM platform was designed to be easy to integrate with everybody, which removes the liability of their only being an RMM offering, without their own PSA or suite of products.
“Integration is critical, and everyone does it because if you don’t integrate with the big boys you are marginalized pretty quick,” he said. “So other companies do this, but almost as an afterthought. It’s a necessity for them to stay relevant. The NinjaRMM tool was built for integrations. We have a very open API and open platform, which seamlessly integrates with the biggest RMMs and PSAs, as well as AV vendors like Webroot and VIPRE. We just announced a joint solution with backup vendor CloudBerry Lab. We have alliances with TeamViewer, one of the largest players in the remote access market, and Splashtop, another remote access company, because we want to offer choices to partners. Others are slotted for further integration. We offer a vision of one stop shopping. That’s how Ninja was built and designed. It’s not an afterthought for us.”
NinjaRMM’s initial base of MSPs leans heavily to the small side, but Daumard said that they also plan to move more upmarket.
“Five to ten employees is our sweet spot, sometimes even one man shops,” he said. “We are moving upstream though, as the product evolves and provides all critical features for larger customers. A few weeks ago, we had a major release which provided third party patch management. Not having this before was a weakness for larger customers, so we fixed this gap.”
The company just revamped their website, www.ninjarmm.com.
“We have a section now where users can request features,” Daumard said. “This is part of our community focus, and this is how we build our road map, inspired by our users. It makes so much sense to do it this way but no one was doing it this way before.”
In the U.S. and Canada, NinjaRMM works directly with its partners, and doesn’t see the need to introduce a distributor as a middleman. The company is aggressively expanding internationally however, and distribution is central to those efforts.
“We are expanding our international footprint, with a very clear strategy of going after those international markets through distributors,” Daumard said. They have four distributors, all of them cloud distributors rather than traditional broadliners. In the U.K., they have Zedsphere. In the Netherlands, their distributor is Portland. EMT, based in Australia, handles Asia Pacific, while Cloud9 is based in South Africa.
Daumard said that his strategy for the year ahead has several components. In addition to recruiting more and larger MSPs, and expanding internationally, NinjaRMM is also refocusing its internal efforts.
“We will accelerate by better structuring our sales internally, putting processes and discipline in sales, marketing and business development so that we can scale up, and take these resources to the next level,” he said. “My objective is to double our size in the next 12 months. We are taking share from entrenched companies, and we have become very successful in being the first choice of some newly created MSPs. They do their due diligence in assessing the right tools for them. We are being fully considered and we win a lot of times. It helps that we have become much more visible in the channel. We are, however, improving all our branding, to establish our visual identity in the channel more strongly.”
