Pax8’s Nick Heddy: ‘Run With Microsoft’ To Capture $180B SMB Spend

To help MSPs capture the opportunity, Pax8’s first partner conference Wingman 2020 in June will feature Microsoft employees walking partners through Dynamics, M365, Azure, with one-on-one coaching, and the registration fee comes with two Microsoft certification exams.

Pax8 is keeping its focus on returning cash to partners by helping them navigate Microsoft sales and marketing incentives, as well as launching its first-ever partner conference -- Wingman 2020 -- where MSPs can learn one-on-one from Microsoft professionals.

“One of the things that Pax8 has always brought to the table is that they’ve made it easy,” said Atul Bhagat, president and CEO of Base Solutions, a Tyson, Va.,-based MSP. “They’re enabling us to take advantage of everything that Microsoft is providing, and they’re making it easy for us to get those marketing dollars, finding new revenue streams. We’ve been with Pax8 for four years now. We’ve seen a significant increase in our revenue being partners with them.”

Bhagat was in the audience as Pax8 chief revenue officer Nick Heddy delivered a keynote at XChange 2020 in San Antonio about how the company is leveraging its relationship with Microsoft to deliver marketing funds, professional services, and returning cash to MSPs through rebates and special offers that come with the Pax8 Wingman experience.

“Run with Microsoft,” Heddy told the crowd. “Raise your hand if you have $1 billion or more in marketing funds this year. Microsoft does and they are spending it and they are creating markets out there. I just want to talk for a moment about opportunity that’s out there with Microsoft.’

Using figures from Microsoft, Heddy said the total addressable market among U.S.-based SMBs is $180 billion, and Microsoft has captured just nine percent of it. He said the amount of data that could be managed globally will also grow to more than four times its current level in the next five years to about 175 trillion gigabytes, while the number of connected devices will grow to 50 billion in the next 10 years, doubling the current number. Meanwhile, 60 percent of the server install base is a Windows server or SQL Server 2008, or 24 million instances that have reached its end of service or end of life.

“It’s not too late to jump in,” Heddy said. “So what are the solutions? There is M365. They have taken the advanced security products, advanced mobility products, to help you secure all those mobile devices in the ecosystem. Microsoft Azure is a great way for you to capture those zettabytes of information that are floating around and get them in the Azure cloud.”

To help MSPs capture the opportunity, Pax8’s first partner conference Wingman 2020 in June will feature Microsoft employees walking partners through Dynamics, M365, Azure, with one-on-one coaching, and the registration fee comes with two Microsoft certification exams.

“We think it’s a huge learning opportunity for some of our team, to go out there and really learn all these products,” said Bhagat, who is sending multiple employees to the event. “It’s really about getting them the learning experience behind Azure. Azure is a big thing. People don’t have a lot of experience on it. Having hands on lab experience, that’s going to be huge.”