Cloud distributor Pax8 has added new search functionality, new reporting functionality for usage-based applications, and a new integration with PSA software from SynchroMSP to its online marketplace.†
All three enhancements, which rolled out this week, are designed to fuel partner satisfaction by delivering a superior customer experience, according to Ryan Walsh, the company’s chief channel officer.
“Everything we’re trying to do is allow you to get in and with a few clicks accomplish your task, and then get out of that activity,” says Walsh. “We think that’ll translate into customers.”
Walsh spoke with ChannelPro at industry association CompTIA’s 2019 ChannelCon event, which took place this week in Las Vegas.
The new search capabilities help users of Pax8’s Omnidash portal locate information about products, customers, subscriptions, and more through a single box. “We don’t force you to go to three or four different places to search for things,” Walsh says. “It’s all in one place.”
Consolidating queries in that manner is increasingly important, Walsh continues, as Pax8’s solution catalog continues to expand. The company added five cloud vendors to its line card last November, for example, and solutions from BDR vendor StorageCraft in April. It will soon begin rolling out unified communications, SD-WAN, and other connectivity offerings as well in connection with a push into the telecommunications market it unveiled last month.
“We’re really mindful of the fact that as we add more products to our catalog, it becomes harder to find things,” Walsh says. The upgraded Omnidash is designed to compensate for that fact.
Also new to the Pax8 marketplace is the ability to view granular reporting information about consumption-priced cloud solutions. In the past, the system reported on usage-based product bundles—like one from Carbonite’s Webroot unit that combines endpoint and DNS filtering software with security awareness training—at an aggregate level only. Now users can view separate billing data for each component application.
“What partners want to do is take that level of detail, and then have that flow through the PSA integration,” Walsh says.
Effective this week, integration options for Pax8’s marketplace include SynchoMSP’s PSA solution. Users who take advantage of that feature can access Pax8 functionality from directly within the SynchroMSP interface, sparing technicians the productivity-sapping effects of switching between consoles.
“We look like a page within their application, so somebody doesn’t really go outside to do anything,” Walsh says. Pax8 introduced similar embedded integration for the ConnectWise Manage PSA system late in 2017.
This week’s marketplace updates are the latest in a steady stream from Pax8, which has embraced agile development methodologies enabling continual incremental improvement. “We’ve had 60 releases since January,” says Walsh, noting that MSPs increasingly demand that kind of responsiveness to feature requests.
“Expectations are increasing,” Walsh says. “You really have to be fast.”
You have to be focused on partners satisfaction as well, he adds, citing research from CompTIA showing that 89% of businesses across industries now place customer experience at the core of their competitive strategy.
“If it’s faster and easier to get information or you’re able to execute a transaction on behalf of your customer faster, that’s part of the experience we’re trying to feed into for our partners,” Walsh says.
