NinjaOne has been having a bit of a moment this year. Actually, it’s been a lot longer than just a moment. The company’s momentum has hit a tipping point and shows no signs of slowing. You could say NinjaOne has arrived.
ChannelE2E caught up with co-founder and CEO Sal Sferlazza recently to talk about this momentum. Sferlazza told me that his company has far eclipsed the 6,000 MSP partners that someone told him was the requirement to be a major player. Sferlazza wouldn’t say how many MSP partners NinjaOne has now, but the company’s total number of customers is 20,000 (including internal IT shops).
But before we get too deeply into the conversation with Sferlazza, let’s take a quick look at some of the major milestones NinjaOne hit in 2024.
NinjaOne's 2024 Milesones
The most recent came earlier this month when NinjaOne overtook N-able to claim the number three slot in RMM market share after leaders ConnectWise and Kaseya, according to channel market research firm Canalys. Canalys numbers show NinjaOne growing by 54%. What’s more, last month NinjaOne was named to the Champions quadrant of Canalys’ Global RMM and PSA Leadership Matrix for 2024.
In February NinjaOne secured $231.5 Million in series C funding, raising its valuation to $1.9 billion. Notable participants in the round included Amit Agarwal, president of Datadog and Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake and ServiceNow.
Also in February, MSP franchise giant TeamLogic IT, selected NinjaOne to manage more than 100,000 endpoints for the company. That wasn’t an isolated instance.
“On any given month we are closing many many MSPs that have tens of thousands of endpoints,” Sferlazza said. “Back in 2017 or event 2019 we had no hope or prayer to engage those folks.”
The momentum reminded Sferlazza of a story about how ChannelE2E’s cofounder told him what milestone he had to hit to be considered one of the big guys.
NinjaOne’s 2024 Momentum: Now One of the Big Guys
“The day that I launched NinjaOne, [ChannelE2E co-founder and content czar Joe Panettieri] launched an article about the death of the individual RMM, and it’s been a joke with us since then,” Sferlazza told ChannelE2E. “I would ask him, ‘Are we one of the big guys yet?’ and he would say ‘Well not until you get to 6,000 partners.’ But we’ve eclipsed that by a good amount at this time.”
NinjaOne’s technology includes both RMM and endpoint management, and Sferlazza said a lot of people use those terms interchangeably.
“There’s obviously a ton of overlap,” he said. “For us, we’re more in the mind toward unified endpoint management and tool consolidation, sewing in MDM and other capabilities around the endpoint.”
Sferlazza is proud of NinjaOne’s RMM offering. Whereas some talk about the commoditization of RMM, he says no, NinjaOne stands above the rest.
“We’re the best in breed RMM by far. I’m happy to say that. There’s no hubris there when I say that. But it’s not a product you put on the shelf and then it continues to stay amazing,” he said. RMM is a product that requires continuing engineering effort to stay best in class. The landscape is always changing, the technology to be managed is always changing.
Platform or Ecosystem?
NinjaOne has seven different product offerings that are part of the overall platform, and the company does not require MSP partners or IT customers to buy the entire stack. Sferlazza has a definite opinion about that.
“Some of our competitors say that you have to buy everything from them. I won’t say their names, but you buy everything,” Sferlazza said. But after 16 years as a software engineer, he believes that people want to use the best tools to do their jobs.
“Our approach to product management and development is that best of breed wins,” he said. That said, Sferlazza believes that it’s important to integrate with partners for some technologies. For instance, NinjaOne is not planning to introduce its own MDR solution (managed detection and response).
“Our strategy is to look at the addressable markets and ask ourselves, ‘do we have a right to own this TAM, or should we partner here?’” he said. “For example, a bad move would be for us to decide to go build an EDR…That’s not our DNA. In today’s world of security you should go buy Crowdstrike or SentinelOne or some other endpoint security vendor. We would want to partner there, and that’s what we are doing.”
Other products are offered to MSP partners for free. For instance, Sferlazza said, NinjaOne offers three user licenses for its documentation software for free to MSPs.
“At the end of the day it’s a wiki, and you are storing and editing documents,” he said. Warranty tracking is also free.
“But what we will not do is compromise the quality of the endpoint, which is our core,” he said.
HaloPSA Partnership
HaloPSA has also been having a moment in the MSP market this year, winning some big MSPs. The company has pledged to not accept private equity funding. HaloPSA also broke into the Champions quadrant of Canalys’ MSPs tools report this year. And NinjaOne announced a partnership with HaloPSA recently.
“There’s a lot of shared DNA there,” Sferlaza said. “They’re an independent company like us. They’ve gotten a lot of accolades on the PSA side.”
