16 01732 759725 their business or through full outsourcing. The acquisitions of companies such as Wirehive in Europe, Bam Boom Cloud and Umbrellar down in APAC are great examples of where we have beefed up our professional services capability to offer our partners more value. Finally, it's that education and enablement piece and the Pax8 Academy. A couple of years ago we made the strategic acquisition of an organisation called SeaLevel that brought that expertise in-house and got us thinking about how we can scale that across a partner base that spans thousands of organisations and multiple continents. TR: What level of market penetration does Pax8 currently have in the UK and EMEA? AW: Microsoft is the true north in terms of what that breadth of opportunity looks like. It has circa 30,000 registered partners in the UK alone. That doesn't mean that there are 30,000 partners for us to go after because they won’t all be a viable fit for us. Canalys estimates there are circa 13,500 MSPs in the UK, and I think that is probably a more realistic number for us to be working towards. That 13,500 figure and the fact that Pax8’s got just over 2,500 partners signed in the UK suggests a market penetration of 15% to 20%. I'm not saying Pax8 will own the market completely, but I do believe there is significantly more upside for us in terms of acquisition of partners and turning those partners into spending partners. The European opportunity is probably ten times the size of the UK in terms of total addressable market, and our serviceable market is probably somewhere between 40 to 50% of that. TR: Pax8’s most important vendor relationship is with Microsoft – and a lot of your customers will choose to standardise on Microsoft end-toend – but you are also looking to offer more choice in your marketplace. How many vendors do you do have in your marketplace now? AW: It's a growing number, that's for sure. When we first launched in the market in the UK, we had 12 or 13 vendors on our line card, very strategically designed because we operate at a vendor category level. For example, we have vendor categories for productivity, infrastructure, continuity and security. We believe we can sell each of those categories into every CLOUD MARKETPLACE continued... partner and, in turn, they should be taking those categories to their customers. So, in the first 12 months we had about 12 or 13 vendors and our US counterparts at that point probably had about 50 or 60. Now, in our third year of operation, we've got around 40 vendors on our line card and we're adding around three or four a month. We want to create choice. We want to create an open marketplace where our vendors and our partners can transact on the solutions available to them. The value we have as a multi-regional marketplace is that we have a large partner base serving the SMB base that vendors have always struggled to reach. TR: Please can you tell me a bit more about data insights in your marketplace and what excites you about them. AW: The partner matchmaker opportunity is huge, being able to unlock and leverage data that's available to us in our platform and take that to our partners to help deliver actionable insights that they can use in conversations with their customers. If you think about how we distribute services, we don't only distribute Microsoft. We also distribute Sentinel One, Proofpoint and Dropsuite, for example. We get to see the data across all four of those vendors, whereas each individual vendor only gets to see the siloed data that their services consume. If we can aggregate that and bring that together, the insights available to us are going to be immense. Ultimately, we want to take those datadriven insights, actionable insights and give them to the partner in a consumable way that allows them to have conversations with their customers, if not to sell more, certainly to identify where there could be a need at a future date. TR: Are you concerned that PSAs may not want to give you access to data that they might want to make more use of? AW: I think that's reasonable. But equally we've introduced partners to the ecosystem that weren't previously using a PSA tool and because of our integrations and the amount of work we put into making those truly world class, these same PSA providers have benefited from us bringing our partners to the table. We're talking a multi trillion-dollar opportunity in cloud services globally. There is enough market for everybody and there’s no reason we won’t see the collaboration that now exists between partners at a vendor or PSA or marketplace level as well. Three of a kind In the last few months, Pax8 has added another three vendors to its offering. q CYRISMA. Standing for Cyber Risk Information Security Management Accountability, CYRISMA is an all-in-one, cloud-hosted cyber risk management platform that simplifies cybersecurity and helps MSPs to manage cyber risks for their customers. It combines multiple risk management capabilities, including sensitive data discovery, secure configuration scanning, cyber risk assessment reporting, third-party patching and compliance tracking, in a single, user-friendly platform. In addition to the identification and assessment of security gaps, CYRISMA enables MSPs to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity by prioritising and mitigating risks. w Bvoip. In a new partnership, Pax8 is enabling MSPs to access bvoip’s UCaaS and VoIP solutions, including unified communications, call centre, application integrations and video conferencing. The streamlined ordering and payment process offered via a single portal will make it easier for partners to access and manage their communication solutions on the cloud, with the added benefit of integrated support services. e Rewst. The addition of Rewst gives partners a purpose-built Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform combining seamless integration with Pax8’s extensive pre-built integrations, ready-to-use workflows and training and support. With Rewst, Pax8 partners can automate end-to-end processes, saving thousands of work hours each month while increasing client retention and business profitability. Rewst offers deep Application Programming Interface (API) integrations with over 40 products commonly used by MSPs, allowing them to automate repetitive, manual tasks that consume significant time and leave room for human error. Examples of workflows automated with Rewst include user onboarding/ offboarding, phishing remediation, licence purchasing and reconciliation for cost savings, billing reconciliation, approval processes and more. Additionally, Rewst addresses often overlooked or unaddressed tickets, enabling MSPs to handle low-return tasks efficiently. www.pax8.com
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