Pax8 has added Intuit to its line card of cloud-based software vendors.
The deal gives Pax8 partners something they’ve wanted for years, notes Ryan Walsh, the cloud distributor’s chief operating officer: the ability to sell Intuit’s popular QuickBooks Online family of financial management tools to their SMB customers.
“This is a long time coming,” he says.
Demand for anytime, anywhere access to QuickBooks has been so strong since the start of the pandemic, Walsh continues, that some businesses utilize desktop-as-a-service solutions largely to make on-premises deployments of the Intuit product available to remote workers. Subscribing to QuickBooks Online, he says, is an easier, more flexible way to accomplish the same goal.
More significantly, adds Bobby Morrison, Intuit’s chief revenue officer, selling QuickBooks Online arms channel pros to participate in a vast and growing sales opportunity among net new users. At present, he says, some 8 million mostly small businesses worldwide run QuickBooks. That seemingly large number, however, is a fraction of the estimated 75 million organizations in the product’s total addressable market, many of which still handle accounting on spreadsheets.
“They start there because that’s the easiest place to go, and as they reach a moderate level of maturity, they start to recognize they can’t continue to operate that way,” Morrison observes.
More potential QuickBooks Online users appear all the time, Walsh adds, noting that research by Intuit conducted late last year found that some 57% of U.S. employees want to start a company of their own someday, and that one in five of those people—or some 17 million individuals—want to do it in 2022.
All of them, Morrison notes, will need technology advice from skilled outsiders. “Trying to figure out what infrastructure they need to build is a monumental task for them,” he says. “They want that off their plate so that they can go spend more time with customers.”
Intuit’s current partners, unlike Pax8’s, are ill suited to serve that need, Morrison notes. “We’re very well connected with accountants,” he says. “The ability to connect a CPA with an MSP who has [technical] depth and network those two together on behalf of the customer is super powerful.”
For the MSP, Walsh adds, financial management software is a firm starting point for a long-term relationship. “It’s a core anchor product,” he says of QuickBooks Online. “It establishes a baseline application that’s highly sticky.”
It also opens the door to cross-sale opportunities of additional, equally important solutions, Walsh notes. “It really supports and complements the other tech stack items that need to be a part of this,” he says, citing security systems and backup software as examples.
Pax8 plans to make further QuickBooks solutions, including payroll and time tracking systems, available to its partners in the future. “It’s the base product suite that we’re going to grow and build upon,” he says of the financial management platform.
QuickBooks Online is the latest in a string of additions to the Pax8 catalog in the last year. Zero trust web threat protection services from Isoolate, vulnerability assessment software from CyberCNS, and managed firewall services from WatchGuard Technologies have been among the others. Secure Access Service Edge and password management software from Nord Security have been available since last month as well.
“Their reputation on VPN was impressive,” says Walsh of Nord, which had not sold through the IT channel prior to its pact with Pax8.
Pax8 placed first among distributors of cloud/MSP service offerings in this year’s ChannelPro Readers’ Choice Awards.
