Webroot expands NinjaRMM relationship around DNS protection

NinjaRMM becomes an early adopter of the new Webroot solution, which has an integrated console with its Business Endpoint Protection offering.

Endpoint and network security vendor Webroot has announced an expansion of their partnership with RMM vendor NinjaRMM. The expanded relationship makes NinjaRMM one of the first vendors to adopt Webroot’s new Webroot SecureAnywhere DNS Protection offering.

Since they entered the MSP space, Webroot has made it a prime focus of their business, with the amount of MSPs who they sell to directly now being a little less than half the number of ones who they reach through partnerships with RMM and PSA integrators.

“Many other vendors are not really MSP ready, and don’t focus on things that make it work for the MSP,” said George Anderson, Webroot’s Director of Product Marketing. “So they aren’t as successful in that market, even when they have very good technology. We are focused heavily on the MSP space.”

Webroot’s partnership with NinjaRMM began in May 2016, and alike other vendors, was focused on the Webroot Business Endpoint Protection solution. Earlier this year, Webroot released its DNS filtering offering, Webroot SecureAnywhere DNS Protection. NinjaRMM now becomes one of the first RMMs to offer this to their MSPs.

“We only launched the DNS filtering a few months ago, and it went to General Availability in July,” Anderson said. “DNS filtering has always been seen as an effective way by MSPs to control malware because it protects against malicious websites.” Designed to protection against malware infections from Web browsing, SecureAnywhere DNS Protection uses the same console as SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection. This lets NinjaRMM’s MSPs easily onboard and manage their customers, setting global Web access policies and giving them real time usage reports.

One of the newer players in the RMM market, NinjaRMM has features of their business model that Anderson said sync well with Webroot, and makes the deal one with long term potential.

“NinjaRMM and ourselves think in very similar ways,” he said. “They have a strong presence among smaller MSPs. A lot of our own MSPs are smaller MSPs, many of whom still do a lot of break-fix, and who have been building an MSP component into their businesses. NinjaRMM, as a newer RMM, has gone after that market to build a presence, offering them a very cost-effective package. For us, this relationship will not have a very high short-term value, but we believe their long-term value is significant, as we believe that they will grow very rapidly as their small customers grow their businesses.”

The deal with NinjaRMM, as with almost all of Webroot’s RMM partners, is non-exclusive.

“We partner with many of these integrators, and with all of these partners, we want to have as deep a relationship as they will let us have,” Anderson said. “Most of them want to offer multiple choices to their MSPs, and NinjaRMM believes strongly in this, that MSPs should make that choice. For us, the exception to this is Continuum. With Continuum, we are embedded into their suite. If someone buys their suite they get us. They get no choice. But with the others, we are non-exclusive, although the closeness of the relationship can vary. For example, Autotask is a looser relationship, which was driven by their customers. Autotask built their integration with us themselves.”