Pax8 Channel Chief and Co-Founder Ryan Walsh sat down recently with ChannelPro’s editorial team to discuss the company’s journey from startup to a leading cloud commerce marketplace, as well as its inclusion in Forrester’s highly touted Marketplace Development Platforms Landscape, Q4 2023 report.
Ryan Walsh
Pax8 launched in 2012 by CEO and Founder John Street and his partners as a startup in a Colorado basement – was inspired by a prior venture they had led called MX Logic (now owned by McAfee), a born-in-the-cloud email security company.
MX Logic’s original business model was to sell direct, with the channel acting as a secondary source of revenue, Walsh said. “But when we changed the model and became partner first, that’s when we took off.”
At the time, there simply wasn’t a marketplace or platform that allowed vendors and businesses to buy, sell, and manage cloud solutions, Walsh said. From that market need, Pax8 was born.
“Initially we called Pax8 a ‘cloud commerce marketplace.’ We got tilted heads, ‘What are you?’ and ‘Can you tell me what that is again?’ Ultimately, we got referred to as a cloud distributor and we embraced that. It fit our vision of acting as a cloud marketplace built for the channel to serve the long tail of the SMB market.”
Fast forward to today and the Pax8 cloud commerce marketplace is delivering an Amazon.com-style experience to users worldwide. This multibillion-dollar segment of the IT industry also plays a pivotal role in connecting vendors, MSPs, and other key stakeholders.
“In the Forrester report, they call out that marketplaces offer partners longer term value creation. We deeply, viscerally believe in that. The marketplace experience ultimately will define the strategy and economics of every industry, not some industries,” Walsh shared.
Solutions Selling Made Easy
The Forrester Report also validated Pax8’s approach to sales partnerships, according to Walsh.
Customers want more control over the sales process and the answer is two-fold: first, to create a curated storefront experience so customers have agency over purchases; and second, to establish MSPs as trusted advisors that solve problems, not just recommend products.
“There are so many vendors, so many products to choose from, It’s really hard for your client to say, ‘Well, I know that one and I want to buy that one.’ Instead, they’re saying they want to fill a need and are looking for solutions,” he explained.
Research website G2 conducted a survey of businesses in which 75% of buyers said they wanted some level of self-service, Walsh said. “They want to self-educate and make sure that products fit their businesses. They don’t want to be sold, they want to be understood.”
That represents a golden opportunity for MSPs that leverage cloud platforms. MSP-branded portals – like the ones Pax8 offers – include a plethora of educational resources.
The second half of the equation is educating the MSP partners themselves. Pax8 helps in four key ways:
- Showing how to configure and utilize the platform
- Sharing business management best practices via its Pax8 Academy
- Sales enablement and partner support
- Pro services, which allow MSPs to outsource some jobs to Pax8 while they come up to speed.
The Importance of Simplicity
Another takeaway from the conversation about the Forrester report is the importance of a simple, transparent IT experience from a management perspective. For example, head counts fluctuate all the time in modern businesses. Customers never want to be charged for a vacant seat or have the wrong licenses, Walsh said.
“We help MSPs monitor value, add ongoing reporting, making sure that the customer is ordering exactly what they’re using – not more, not less. That’s a huge value add, especially when it comes to consumption-based products, by using APIs that allow IT partners to aggregate billing, MSPs can put a solution together of multiple vendor products and create a single bill that captures everything.”
Final Takeaways
For Walsh and his team, helping MSPs to scale is worth getting excited about.
“I don’t think I understood the importance of passion in business before we started Pax8,” he shared. “When we won awards, I would ask MSP partners, ‘Why did you vote for us? Was it the cool video? The sock giveaway? Something else?’ They said, ‘It just seemed like you sincerely believed in what you were talking about.’ So that’s what we focus on, showing people our passion and our belief in what we bring to the table.”
When asked if he had any final takeaways for the ChannelPro audience, Walsh smiled.
“Absolutely. If you assemble a unique combination of products and you have the technology and support from a company like ours, you can take advantage of this massive market opportunity described in the Forrester report. You’ll be able to create loyalty with your customers and deliver a consistently great experience. You will grow.
“But it’s very hard for an MSP to build that success by themselves. That’s why it’s absolutely accurate that marketplaces will help define the future of every industry, including this one.”
Image: iStock
