Pax8 Marketplace Expands Line Card with Private-Offer Vendors

Pax8 is looking to expand its base of service providers, vendors and other customers, while providing quicker onboarding and delivery times through a “private offer vendor program” that connects partners to products already vetted and sold on hyperscaler marketplaces.

The program has many facets designed to leverage and service an evolving channel landscape. Foremost, Pax8 designed it to quickly onboard vendors onto the Pax8 marketplace and bring specialized, third-market products to MSPs and other service providers who need them to build full solutions for SMB clients. Many of those SMB-focused products – such as marketing or legal applications – are currently sold through Microsoft or AWS marketplaces but don’t have the traction to reach or attract the MSPs that need them.

Pax8’s Nikki Meyer

“The vendors that focus on the SMB are coming to us and saying, ‘We spent all this time, money and effort to get on these hyperscaler marketplaces and nobody’s finding us. Nobody’s buying us. Why?’’’ said Nikki Meyer, Pax8’s corporate vice president of vendor experience. “That’s because there’s so many of them, and there’s no differentiation, there’s no potential GTM (go-to-market) that has been done.”

Serving the New Channel via Pax8 Marketplace

The “private offer vendor” products are becoming more important to Pax8 as it builds a line card that can attract nontraditional channel players, such as niche-market providers (accounting, construction and health care, to name a few), consultants and influencers. Pax8 categorizes those products as “transactional” opposed to “strategic,” a level that typically includes enhanced go-to-market support such as vendor account manager, targeted marketing initiatives and other services that help build stronger partnerships and visibility.

“Let’s say one day should we get 500 vendors on the line card, we cannot continue to have the same interaction and strategy with every single vendor, so we’re going to split it out between strategic and transactional,” Meyer said.

A private-offer vendor writing to Pax8’s API, requiring no additional onboarding services other than integration, can take as little as a few hours to onboard since the hyperscaler is handling much of the back end. That’s compared to six to eight weeks if Pax8 is writing to a vendor’s API and two to four weeks if a vendor is writing to Pax8’s API, including onboarding services, Meyer said.

“It’s a programmatic engine that hyperscalers – both Microsoft and AWS – have built for us to be able to sell some of the vendors built on their platform in our line card,” she said. “They’re still recognizing the transaction, so it’s beneficial to the hyperscaler and it’s beneficial to us because the time to launch them is quicker.”

Pax8’s latest private-offer vendors include MailGuard 365 and Solgari Contact Center, available this week, with Officeatwork and Zoho apps coming soon. All are built on the Microsoft Marketplace.

First Phase of Program Considered a Success

The launch of the new products is the second phase of Pax8’s private offer vendor program. The company started a pilot program about two years with the Law ToolBox docketing platform, also on the Microsoft Marketplace. Pax8 called that a success, saying it “drew the interest of more than 28 new partner types to our marketplace.”

“For us to start bringing these vendors on at scale, we needed something in place to have transparency to the vendors in terms of what are the gives and gets and what does their partnership look like with Pax8,” Meyer said. “We spent a lot of time focusing on building the vendor program, providing transparency to the vendor: You’re going to come in on this level; you’re going to come on as a transactional — this is what you’re going to get.”

The move comes as Pax8 prepares to roll out its new vendor program around a new AI, data-driven marketplace. Look for that to launch sometime next year. Despite the outreach to new types of partners, Meyer stresses Pax8 is still committed to its traditional vendors and MSPs in the SMB market.

“We will continue to service our MSPs by giving them the top vendors within the IT space. But by going into these additional categories, it’s helping our MSPs to recognize more revenue,” she said. “It’s helping them increase their ability to provide professional services around some of these potential applications. It’s increasing their revenue stream and it’s increasing their profitability because it’s incremental margin that can be added.”