15 CLOUD MARKETPLACE That's what this new marketplace is going to do. Here are all your customers; here are all the products that you currently serve – in fact, not just you but also other MSPs that look like you; here's your whitespace; let's have a conversation. It’s such a powerful tool to put in the hands of MSPs.” Riley also cites productivity gains made possible by Storefront and its extensive automation. “Today, we have self-service – customers can go into marketplace and they can self-serve a licence and it works really well. But now Pax8 is talking about them being able to go into Storefront, digitally sign an order and for it to be automatically provisioned in the marketplace and, through integrations, pushed into a PSA tool or RMM tool. Having that capability removes the need to send emails and orders back and forth and takes out another series of manual steps. As someone who runs a very, very small team, every single interaction counts, and wherever we can we automate to make it simpler for our customers to self-serve and buy direct.” four or five of them. It's not for us to tell a partner which PSA provider they should integrate with; we should be providing choice so that if they have a personal preference, we still provide that connection. Then there’s the transactional piece, investing in the platform to make it intuitive and leveraging that rich tapestry of data to give our partners actionable insights. Our investment in community is another big reason why Pax8 is successful. Traditionally, partners might have held their competitors at arm's length, whereas now (and Microsoft has been a big driver of this) they look at how they can enhance the end user experience by working together to deliver multiple solutions rather than trying to do everything themselves. We want to cultivate communities where we can bring together partners physically and virtually to share best practice and Dynamics landgrab In addition to enhancements to Marketplace (and the launch of a mobile app later in the year), Pax8 plans to continue to extend its reach in EMEA and strengthen its vendor offering to give partners more choice. In this context, Harald Nuij, CEO of Pax8 EMEA, is encouraging partners to do more to exploit Pax 8’s capabilities and expertise in Microsoft Dynamics, gained through its acquisition earlier this year of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central services organisation Bam Boom Cloud. He said: “Dynamics is a massive opportunity for MSPs. At Beyond, I attended one of the sessions on Dynamics and what really stuck with me is that 40% of a business's tech spend is currently on the ERP and CRM solutions they have. Yet today only 2% of all MSPs in Europe that transact on Modern Workplace also transact on Microsoft Dynamics. There’s a big opportunity for MSPs to leverage the knowledge and the professional services that we provide in order to make MSPs really great at Dynamics.” www.pax8.com ultimately to deliver a better end user experience. The US business uses the term collapetition to describe this competition/cooperation. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge our investment in professional services and our ability to support partners either as an extension of the IT strategy the MSP has devised for them. Customers will be able to selfserve 24/7 and process quotations and orders electronically. A powerful tool Scott Riley, Founder of Leeds-based Microsoft 365 and Azure partner Cloud Nexus, one of 10 EMEA MSPs at Pax8 Beyond, welcomed these new additions to the Pax8 Marketplace, citing Opportunity Explorer and Storefront in particular. “I do a lot of work with MSPs who are looking to drive new sales and one question I like to ask is ‘Have you made a spreadsheet with a list of all your customers down the left-hand side and a list of all the products and services you sell across the top, filling in fields with an X where appropriate?’. All the white space represents customers you can speak to about products you haven’t yet sold them’. The answer I get is resoundingly No. Yet, I know that by doing exactly this exercise you can drive revenue up by 40% without adding a single new customer.” He added: “It's hard for people to pull that data together. Well, guess what? Following Pax8 Beyond, Technology Reseller caught up with Aaron Watts, VP of Sales for Pax8 EMEA, to get his perspective on the announcements, particularly in relation to EMEA where Pax8 launched its marketplace in January, 2021 and where it currently has 4,500 partners, of which circa 3,000 transact on a monthly basis (respective figures for the UK are 2,500 and 1,600). Technology Reseller (TR): Pax8 makes much of its focus on the ‘partner experience’ and ‘ongoing lifetime value’. Please could you explain what you mean by that. Aaron Watts (AW): As well as things like dedicated account managers and consolidated billing, which really are table stakes now, I would point to professional service automation as a great example – not just deciding to integrate with one market leader but looking to integrate with Huge opportunity Continued... Aaron Watts
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