Pax8 Preps New MSP Cloud Marketplace For Launch

The company, best known for bringing cloud-based technologies to MSPs, is in the process of rolling out a new cloud marketplace that uses AI and machine learning to help MSPs learn about the gaps in what their customers are using and anticipate future requirements.

Ryan Walsh

Pax8 is getting ready to roll out a new cloud marketplace taking advantage of the latest in AI and machine learning technology to help MSPs and their clients focus less on products and more on solutions.

That’s the word from Ryan Walsh, chief strategy officer and a co-founder at Greenwood Village, Colo.-based Pax8, who told an audience of MSPs during last week’s XChange NexGen 2023 conference in Houston that the company is moving from a static marketplace to one that is more dynamic and less product-focused.

Pax8’s current cloud marketplace is global in nature, Walsh said. It runs 24/7 and processes an average of one transaction per minute minute. However, he said, it still looks like static tiles online.

[Related: Pax8 Execs On Revamped Marketplace: MSPs ‘Ready To Move Today’ Will Win]

Given Pax8’s disruption and innovation mindset, the company decided to take its cloud marketplace into the future, and two years ago brought in Scott Chasin as its new chief technology officer, Walsh said. Chasin, working with Pax8’s engineers and designers, realized that the future of cloud marketplaces depended on data-driven insights, he said.

“We were thinking about what the future marketplace should look like,” he said. “It really should be about the data and having it focus on you, and how this can help you serve your customers utilizing data insights on what solution comes next.”

Cloud technology providers, including Pax8, have been coming to partners and saying they have added a new product to the catalog, Walsh said.

“That’s not how products are sold anymore,” he said. “It’s solution-based. And obviously, this community knows that we’re focused on how do we optimize that so you can take advantage of more and more wonderful products.”

Pax8’s new cloud marketplace, first unveiled in June during the company’s Beyond conference, aims to make it easier for MSPs to utilize data, AI, and machine learning to find complete solutions, and not just purchase products, Walsh said.

“When you think about it, we’re really focused on delivering a set of features that helps you guide your insights into where your opportunities are, how do you action those opportunities,” he said. Because it’s hard to do that.”

The first step is to make sure that Pax8 get data into the marketplace, and one of the easiest way is by syncing with MSPs’ PSA (professional services automation) and RMM (remote monitoring and management) data, Walsh said. That gives Pax8 a view of customers’ needs along with the services, SaaS products, and other products they have purchased, and paves the way for Pax8’s new Opportunity Explorer, he said.

Opportunity Explorer provides insights into where customer product gaps exist, both by actively searching and filtering and sorting those products and via the product lens which shows how one MSP customer’s product gaps compares to those of the community as a whole, Walsh said.

“One product lens, for example, helps you with your customer security posture,” he said. “What we’re doing here is we’re overlaying the CIS security framework to provide product gaps for your customer. We heard there’s a lot of interest in this. It’s very hard to do if you’re just dealing with spreadsheets and columns and rows. This allows us to really take advantage of finding where the gaps are, across all of those controls.”

The result is that the MSP can start with a product category and security posture conversation, and then can see what products fit in those sections, Walsh said.

“We really believe this is a way that you can make faster decisions, better decisions optimized for your customers’ needs,” he said.

MSPs can also look on a customer by customer basis to leverage these insights as well as what’s going on in the community can make recommendations fitting its particular customer base, he said.

With its new cloud marketplace, Pax8 also introduced a solution center which allows them to create their own customized packages which can include not just SaaS products but also their own services and hardware, all in one quote, Walsh said.

“Then you can create not only standardized packages, but also solutions for a specific customer,” he said. “Now why is that relevant? Configure, price, quote? Alright, we’re not the first to the quoting game. But what we’ve done here with this future for our marketplace is incorporate it into your marketplace. There’s so many powerful things you can do with that. We can make this available in multiple ways that you can send to your customer, whether it’s an email or URL.”

That, however, is just the start as it allows MSPs and their customers to move beyond approving a quote, Walsh said.

“You can do more things once they come in, like expose them to more opportunities, other services that you might want to provide, help them with some self service,” he said. “But the point of it is, once they’re in their own storefront, you can interact with your customer in a new way, giving you a competitive advantage.”

Pax8’s new marketplace was also built with the vendor community in mind, taking advantage of the fact that when customers are associated with a particular partner, the lifetime value of that customer increases.

“And so we built this marketplace so that we can do that and actually match customers that need to be tethered with partners,” he said. “This is a new way for you to acquire customers. … Imagine if you had an opportunity to utilize this marketplace to take your profile on what a customer is looking for and match them together so you have a new way to acquire customers. This is what the future of marketplaces can do.”

Now is the time for MSPs to look at how they utilize marketplaces, Walsh said. He cited a B2B report by McKinsey & Co. that forecast that $17 trillion in sales would flow through B2B marketplaces by 2030.

“We want to be a part of that and take advantage of that massive opportunity,” he said.

It will take time to really understand how the new Pax8 cloud marketplace will work for MSPs, said Kenny Keller, chief technology officer at Emsco Solutions, an Oklahoma City-based MSP.

One concern Keller has about setting up a cloud marketplace is that his company might get an order from a client it has never met who will one day call and said the MSP is having issues with installation.

However, he said, the potential of cloud marketplaces is worth looking at.

“Oh, yes, there’s great potential,” he said. “I have larger clients that I would let go into a marketplace like that every day. I’m not against it. It’s just that there’s the potential to lose a little bit of a touch.”

Pax8’s new cloud marketplace is expected to roll out during the first half of 2024, Walsh said.