The Leader Changed in One Quarter
Two quick disclosures before we start. I own shares in N-able, which is part of this story. And my reporting on Kaseya’s patent lawsuit against Slide is cited in that case. I’m not a party to it.
The software MSPs run their businesses on is still a growing market. What’s changing is who leads it.
Start with Omdia. Its quarterly tracking of the worldwide RMM and PSA software market puts that market at 600 million dollars for the second quarter, up 15.6 percent from a year earlier. And the leadership moved. NinjaOne grew its RMM revenue 53 percent and took its share from 15 percent to 20, tying ConnectWise for the top spot for the first time. Kaseya, which led the quarter before, fell to third at 18.8 percent. Omdia’s Jessica Davis notes that established vendors had held those positions for years and looked untouchable.
N-able sits further down that chart, at 7.4 percent. In its third-quarter results, N-able reporphototed revenue of 137.5 million dollars, up 4.9 percent, and has now lowered its full-year recurring revenue outlook twice. In May, it expected that number to grow 8 to 9 percent. It now expects 3 to 4. The explanation came with the first cut. On its second-quarter call, N-able said its largest renewal group of the year, mostly endpoint management and endpoint security, renewed in the mid-80 percent range when it had expected the high 80s. Chief executive John Pagliuca described some customers staying at lower price points, others moving to competitors, and MSPs managing fewer devices.
And the newcomers are pricing well below all of them. Flamingo made its OpenFrame platform generally available, bundling monitoring, patching, ticketing and security monitoring with two AI agents, starting at 1 dollar per device per month. Flamingo says 440 MSPs are using it and 2,500 more are waiting. Those are its own numbers, and Channel Insider notes that switching platforms is a heavy lift not every MSP will take on yet.
Hear what that adds up to. Spending on these tools is growing, not shrinking. But it’s moving: toward a challenger that keeps folding more into one platform, away from incumbents discounting to hold on, and with newcomers pricing a full management platform at a dollar a device.
In plain terms, the market is growing, and it’s being decided at renewal.
So why has this market suddenly become so easy to move?
Cheap Features, Costly Commitments
Underneath all of this is one dynamic. AI has made software features cheap to build, and when features stop being scarce, a vendor can’t win the renewal on features alone. So it reaches for the one thing that still holds a customer in place: commitment.
Start with how the building changed. On this show, Austin McChord, who founded Datto and now runs Slide as interim chief executive, told me Slide will ship its 2027 product roadmap before the end of 2026. He said that if you’d told him in August, he wouldn’t have believed it. Feature work that used to take a team of six or eight now goes to a team of one, with AI doing the work underneath and parts of the process running with no human in the loop. People still review what ships. But the bottleneck that used to set a vendor’s pace is gone.
When building gets that cheap, features stop being something a vendor can charge for separately. LogicMonitor made its Edwin AI features standard in every package of its monitoring platform, drawn from an allowance of AI credits that scales by tier. Chief product officer Garth Fort says IT teams don’t need more separate observability tools “with AI bolted on.” Hatz AI added Spaces, a shared AI workspace for MSPs and their clients, at no additional cost inside its existing packages. The AI that was supposed to be the next upsell is being given away as part of the platform.
That leaves the incumbent one lever. N-able’s own filings describe what it calls its Long-Term Contract Initiative, started in 2024 to move more subscriptions from month-to-month onto long-term committed contracts. The company notes those commitments came with what it calls volume and pricing rationalization. Read plainly, that means adjusted terms in exchange for the commitment.
Now, a fair objection: long contracts aren’t new, and committing has always bought a discount. True. What’s new is how fast the thing you’re committing to can be copied. When one vendor can ship a year of roadmap in a quarter, so can its competitors, and the feature that justified a multi-year term can show up somewhere else, for less, in the second year.
In plain terms, features are now cheap and fast for everyone, so commitment is what incumbents are really selling.
For the MSP, that makes the renewal the one moment the leverage sits on your side of the table.
But leverage only matters if you know what to spend it on.
Your Clients Are Buying Proof
Look at where your clients’ money is heading. It isn’t heading toward more tools.
Start with Techaisle. In a study of 3,100 businesses, analyst Anurag Agrawal finds that small business security has moved from buying protection to buying proof. Among firms with fewer than 100 employees, 59 percent had a known cyberattack in the past year. Only 9 percent are very confident they could recover from a major incident, and only 8 percent tested their incident response or disaster recovery plan in the last three months. That’s fewer than one in twelve. The pressure to prove it is coming from outside. Among insured midmarket firms, 75 percent face controls their insurer requires, including incident response plans tested on a schedule. And while 48 percent of small businesses rely on an MSP as their primary security partner, Techaisle finds no more than 27 percent of channel partners offer any of the proof work at all: insurer questionnaire packs, incident test records, AI usage attestations.
The insurers are moving the same way on AI. On this show, Bernhard Kirchner, founder of SynData Labs, described a market splitting three ways. Some carriers exclude AI outright. Most say nothing about it. A smaller group prices it in, and those carriers want a technical evaluation of the AI system and governance documentation before they’ll write coverage. Even under a silent policy, he says, documented risk work doesn’t guarantee a payout, but it makes your position stronger. Kirchner’s firm does this kind of review work, so factor that in.
Put those together. The client’s next dollar goes to evidence that the controls work and that the business can recover. It doesn’t go to another console. And the MSPs positioned to produce that evidence are a minority.
So here’s the choice. At every tool renewal, treat the contract as a live competition. Take the shortest term and the cleanest exit you can get, with your data portable and nothing bundled you’d have to unwind. Then put what you save into the work clients now pay for: a scheduled recovery test with a measured result, and an evidence file mapped to their insurer’s questions.
Or take the multi-year discount, hand your leverage back while the market is still moving, and keep spending on the layer your clients have stopped paying extra for. It’s the business version of locking in a fixed-rate loan just as prices start to fall.
Before you make that call, it’s worth hearing the best case for signing long.
Because the strongest objection is a good one: every platform switch costs weeks of technician time, and standardizing on one stack for years is how good MSPs get efficient. But a short term isn’t a switch. You can stay on the same platform, keep the same runbooks, and still renew annually with your data portable. What you’re preserving is the option, and in a market where the leader changed in a single quarter, the option is exactly what the vendor is pricing. The MSP that comes out of this stretch ahead isn’t the one with the newest platform. It’s the one that walks into every vendor renewal knowing it could leave, and into every client review with proof it can bring them back.
What to Consider
- Put every renewal date on one calendar. List each platform contract with its term, its auto-renewal date and its notice window. Many agreements require notice well before the end date, so your leverage expires earlier than the contract suggests.
- Get the exit in writing before you negotiate the renewal. Ask each vendor what a full export looks like (devices, scripts, policies, ticket history) and in what format. If they can’t answer clearly, that answer tells you how long the contract really runs.
- Get the annual price next to the multi-year price. If the gap is small, the commitment isn’t buying you much. If it’s large, the vendor is paying to keep you from shopping, so shop before you sign.
If this trend continues: Through 2027, share in the MSP tool market will keep moving at renewal, and the MSPs on short terms will capture the price cuts. Since I own N-able shares, here’s how to score me: if N-able’s renewal rates climb back into the high 80s on long-term contracts, the market stopped moving and this was the wrong call.