Pax8 boosts MSPs with new white-label marketplaces and AI-driven sales leads

Cloud commerce marketplace provider Pax8 has unveiled its new platform, allowing managed service providers to build their own storefronts and identify sales opportunities through AI.

The first of two key features, Opportunity Explorer, is an intelligent sales system that employs AI and data to help managed service providers identify sales opportunities and to tailor their recommendations.

The second, Storefronts, enable MSPs to create a branded buying experience for their customers who want a self-serve option.

“We are empowering our partners with the enterprise-grade tools they need to thrive, because we understand their business and technology pain points,” Pax8 chief product officer Libby McIlhany said at the company’s Beyond 24 conference in Denver, Colorado.

“With the launch of the new Pax8 Marketplace, partners can gain unprecedented AI-driven insights into their product portfolio’s alignment with customer needs, allowing them to craft solutions that unleash extraordinary growth and also deliver top-notch security.”

McIlhany told Reseller News the new Marketplace features launched in Denver were just the start.

“I don’t think our goal is ever to give the perfect solution to every single one of our MSPs that looks exactly the same,” she said.

“Our goal is to make tools that will meet the needs of most of our MSPs. Our goal was to hit as many of our partners of all different shapes and sizes as possible.”

As well as the headline features, the Marketplace also provides a catalogue featuring smart search and advanced sorting capabilities to make it easy for partners to find what they are looking for.

Multi-cart capability allows partners to create multiple sales carts for multiple customers simultaneously which can be held until ready.

A quotes feature provides a simplified quote-to-contract process so MSPs can see the status of each quote, customise quote templates and create, share and publish new quotes.

A solutions feature enables partners to architect a solutions library using products they know align with their customers’ needs, so they can build these once and easily re-sell them again.

A modern user experience would make static catalogues a “relic of yester-year”, Pax8 said.

Daniel Caruana, managing director of Sydney-based MSP FOIT, said he thought the Marketplace was very well put together.

Out of the box the interface was “quite streamlined, quite polished”, he said. However, he still thought it had a way to go in order to become a production quoting tool for his business.

“There’s a lot of moving parts with professional services agreements and other sources of potential hardware procurement, but for a first step I think it’s quite interesting and quite good for us as a prospecting tool with the insights as well as giving a portal to our clients.”

That was becoming more and more important.

“They don’t want quotes in PDF anymore,” Caruana said. “They want to almost bypass the sales and account management team and have the power.”

Overall, the development was “very timely”, he said, and the marketing and other work Pax8 was doing would boost the appetite for the Marketplace.

Jay McBain, chief analyst at Canalys, said the tech industry was poised to double world GDP growth, fueled in part by the small and medium-sized business sector and its “insatiable” need for technology.

“This provides tremendous opportunities for MSPs that serve this sector,” he said.

The new Pax8 Marketplace will be available to North American and EMEA partners on June 17 and APAC partners on June 18. Partners attending Pax8’s Beyond 2024 conference will get early access.

Rob O’Neill attended the Beyond 24 conference as a guest of Pax8.