Intelisys, Pax8 Veteran Strikes Out on His Own

Andrew Pryfogle, the Intelisys and short-lived Pax8 veteran, is starting his own company. The former chief market development officer at Pax8 just founded CX Effect, according to a recent LinkedIn post.

The founder and CEO of CX Effect calls the company a master CX integrator. The company helps partners build full-stack customer experience solutions for their medium enterprise-size customers.

CX Effect’s Andrew Pryfogle

“I recently made a big decision to go all in on a really big idea,” Pryfogle said in a video. “The market is primed for it. The tech stack, the talent, the demand — it’s all converging at the perfect time. With tremendous support from my colleagues at Pax8, and a wife and daughter that push me to think big every single day, I’ve spun out of Pax8 to launch an exciting new venture.”

While Pryfogle has been working on the new company’s strategy, framework and team, he’s mum with more details about the new venture. Clearly, the customer experience opportunity is core to CX Effect.

“CX is key to building and growing relevance with your customers,” he said.

Building Anticipation

To build anticipation, expect the launch within the next few weeks. Want to know more? Sign up for a front row seat.

His team at Pax8 issued the following: “Pax8 is committed to partner education and enablement to empower new knowledge and growth. … We are grateful to Andrew for his contribution to Pax8 and how he helped us build a growth framework in network and communications. And we support his move and wish him all the best on his next venture.

On MSP-Channel Convergence

In July 2019, Pax8 announced that Pryfogle joined the company as chief market development officer. He was hired to help spur MSP-agent channel convergence.

Here’s what he told Channel Futures at the time: “I’m super excited about this opportunity. I think that it’s spot-on; this convergence of the channel is really starting to accelerate. Going forward, there’s not going to be a pure-play MSP or pure-play agent or VAR or integrator or whatever kind of title you want to use for that. I think that end user customers will dictate to partners – this is how I want to consume; this is how I want to buy – and partners of all stripes will have to be prepared to address those needs through a variety of business models.

“Customers don’t wake up and say, ‘I have this technology problem; maybe I should call and MSP or VAR or agent.’ Instead they’re asking, ‘I’ve got this technology problem, and who do I trust to help me solve it?’ Partners have to get good across a much broader breadth of services to be able to address that. That’s where Pax8 has some advantage.

“Agents have a tremendous opportunity to expand their capabilities and to leverage the intelligent platform that Pax8 has developed, which is phenomenal. And MSPs are going to open up new revenue opportunities with the categories just mentioned [networking and UCaaS]. There are a lot of MSPs that haven’t yet gone into the areas of UCaaS, cloud contact centers, and SD-WAN. That’s all money on the table that they can grab and garner a greater share of wallet with their customers.

We want to be the leading cloud distributor to make that process super easy and enable partners to grow their customer relationships.”

Next?

Pax8 didn’t respond to inquiries about who would fill the chief market developer officer position.

Pryfogle left Intelisys, where he worked for about seven years, to join Pax8. As senior vice president, cloud transformation, he led Intelisys’ cloud, marketing and corporate strategy efforts. Pryfogle stayed through the ScanSource acquisition in 2016.