Why 2021 will be the biggest and best year yet for Nebula customers

Although Zyxel added scores of new features to its cloud management service last year – and the numbers of registered devices were up by more than a third. Yet all that is set to be eclipsed in 2021, which is great news for the increasing number of Zyxel customers and partners who are using Nebula to manage their networks remotely, says Kevin Drinkall, EMEA Wireless and Cloud Market Development Manager at Zyxel.

We are making improvements to our products all the time and one major effort over the past year has been to make more of our devices Nebula-enabled. By this springtime, we expect to have over 60 of our switches, access points and security appliances available to be managed remotely using Nebula.

We are also continually enhancing the service itself and last year added 73 new features or enhancements (68 of which were added to the Base version, which we supply free of charge).

A significant majority of the products we sold last year (61 percent) were registered in Nebula – that’s 25 percent up on 2019. The total number of devices registered under Nebula increased by just over one third (34 percent), year-on-year.

Accelarated adoption

Part of the reason for the acceleration is that new working practices have made remote management tools more attractive. But it’s also due to the huge and continual investment and effort Zyxel has been putting into Nebula. As you can tell from those figures, many more of our customers were already moving to Nebula at the start of last year. The pandemic situation has just given that added momentum.

We will add even more new features over the course of 2021, and we will also be making more of our devices Nebula-enabled, starting with the extended USG FLEX family of security appliances, which are due to be announced in March 2021.

In addition, we are making changes to the Nebula licensing options. There will now be Base, Plus and Pro versions available, allowing you to choose the option that best suits your needs – the details of which I will outline in a separate blog.

Added momentum

As a result of all this activity – and the impetus that is already driving uptake – we expect 2021 to easily eclipse 2020 as the biggest year yet for Nebula. There is more to come too – more enhancements and improvements and more devices being enabled for Nebula.

While we will continue to give you a choice of exactly how you want to manage your Zyxel devices (stand-alone, with a dedicated controller, or remotely), in the fullness of time we expect almost all Zyxel devices to be managed using Nebula, either by network administrators or by managed services provider partners.

That’s the direction most of our customers are moving in now and, as we exist solely to serve the needs of our customers, that’s where we will continue to focus our efforts. If you would like to find out more about Nebula and how it can help you manage your network and devices more efficiently and effectively, please contact your local Zyxel office, or authorised reseller partner.