Pax8 Gets New Zealand Coverage With Umbrellar Acquisition

‘This just fit perfectly, timing-wise, their expertise, their culture, their employees. They have a strong reputation in the New Zealand market, so it checked a lot of boxes,’ says Ryan Walsh, chief operating officer at Pax8.

Denver-based cloud distributor Pax8 has acquired New Zealand-based cloud services firm Umbrellar to expand its geographical and digital transformation services in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ryan Walsh, chief operating officer at Pax8, said one of the things the company is committed to is expanding geographically. This is the first New Zealand-based company Pax8 has acquired. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We already made some inroads into the APAC region, opening up an office down there,” he told CRN. “Umbrellar and their presence in New Zealand, they’re named Microsoft‘s No. 1 CSP in New Zealand and have an Azure managed services expertise…it’s just almost too good to be true. This just fit perfectly, timing-wise, their expertise, their culture, their employees. They have a strong reputation in the New Zealand market, so it checked a lot of boxes.”

Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, Umbrellar will bring over 50 employees and more than 1,000 customers to Pax8. As a leading Microsoft cloud provider, the company was named Microsoft NZ Partner of the Year in 2019.

[Related: PAX8 SECURES $185M FUNDING ROUND, SAYS MORE ACQUISITIONS ON THE HORIZON]

“With Aotearoa’s second-biggest export being tech, we owed it to our partners to be able to service all their technology needs regardless of location, locally here in New Zealand and globally,” David Howden, CEO at Umbrellar, told CRN. “This deal with Pax8 does just that. The doors are now open for our New Zealand partners and customers to be served by us throughout APAC, Europe, and the US. A great win for New Zealand.”

Walsh said the APAC market is “critical” for Pax8 as all of it centers around trust.

“We like to think we‘re trying to do it right at Pax8 with building our brand and our culture,” he said. “You can’t take for granted that within region you‘ve got to make sure that you’re establishing that trust. They had it.”

He said Umbrellar had a “great reputation” with its “key vendor” Microsoft, “and then to add the Azure expertise, that’s hard to come by.”

“So many partners are trying to build practices around Azure, and so to have the expertise to help guide that journey is critical,” he said. The acquisition is an example of how Pax8 is expanding globally and capturing more markets. And when it comes to acquisitions in the future, Pax8 will continue to focus on geographical expansion and “tech tuck-ins,” when a larger company acquires a smaller company and integrates its platforms.

“We take the recipe from what we learned in the U.S. and North American market, and then we go and expand,” Walsh said. “There’s bi-directional learning that’s going on here. There’s expertise that’s coming from that group that we‘re listening to, trying to understand and seeing if we can replicate and share across the world.”