‘We have developed this marketplace with one goal in mind, your success,’ says Libby McIlhany, chief product officer for Pax8. ‘We’re giving you the keys to the kingdom of easy-to-use tools and AI insights designed to save you time and accelerate the growth of your business.’

Pax8 has unveiled the next generation of its revamped cloud marketplace designed to transform how MSPs deliver solutions to their end customers.

The Denver-based cloud distributor debuted the new marketplace at its Beyond conference in Denver this week which had more than 2,500 attendees.

“We have developed this marketplace with one goal in mind, your success,” Libby McIlhany, chief product officer for Pax8, said during the Beyond conference. “We’re giving you the keys to the kingdom of easy-to-use tools and AI insights designed to save you time and accelerate the growth of your business.”

With the new marketplace, partners can better understand their customers and unlock new opportunities for growth, delivering enhanced insights driven by their own data.

With a modern new user experience that is purpose-built for MSPs, the marketplace can help them quickly identify and act on sales opportunities and security vulnerabilities.

“Our new customer-centric marketplace is a product built with the promise that every feature and function has been thoughtfully architected to make her growth easier, quicker and more certain,” McIlhany said.

At the 2023 Beyond conference, Pax8 unveiled the revamped cloud marketplace that uses the power of data and AI to act as a customer acquisition engine for its partners.

The marketplace enables Pax8 to help MSPs get matched up with end customers who are looking to buy direct through Pax8’s vendor partners.

Through a “buy now” button that most Pax8 vendor partners will have on their websites, end customers will be rerouted to Pax8’s marketplace and prompted to answer questions that will match them with an MSP if they don’t have one already.

New Marketplace Features

The cloud marketplace starts with a redesigned homepage full of features designed to enhance the MSP experience such as data insights and resources like the Pax8 Academy team.

“We wanted it to be highly relevant and helpful, but not overwhelming,” McIlhany said. “We’ve also simplified the information architecture and navigation to ensure that you can access everything that you need simply and easily.”

The refined catalog allows MSPs to find exactly what they’re looking for, through smart search and advanced sorting, designed to work together as a comprehensive tool to find the right products for end customers.

“This isn’t your typical transactional catalog, it’s the gateway to our new shopping experience,” she said.

The multi-cart feature allows partners to create multiple carts simultaneously that can be held until ready, “This is a seamless fulfillment process allowing you to effortlessly track and action your customer’s requests,” she said.

Opportunity explorer is a tool that acts as a high-powered set of binoculars, allowing partners to zoom in on the specifics to clearly see the bigger picture of the customer. MSPs can see tools that a specific client is using and actionable insights on tools that could be a great fit.

“Opportunity explorer uses rich data to provide actionable insights with searching, filtering and sorting capabilities,” she said. “It also allows for precise customization to reflect your customer’s actual needs.”

The solutions capability enables MSPs to build a solutions library using products that would align with their customers’ need.

The quoting tool provides a simplified quote-to-contract process so partners can instantly view the status of each quote and brand. They can also customize quote templates, create new quotes with ease and share and publish quotes.

“The quoting tool is tailor made for our partners and is directly integrated into our marketplace,” she said. “No more disjointed processes or clunky transitions from platform to platform.”

After using the quoting tool, customers can then create and curate their very own storefronts for their customers.

“This self-service model empowers your customers while reducing the workload on your support team, streamlining transactions from start to finish,” she said. “It’s offering your customers the autonomy that they seek within the boundaries that you set.”

Customers will be able to purchase the licenses that they need, when they need them, without MSP involvement. If an MSP is not fully comfortable with that, they can easily set approvals for any orders a customer makes.

End customers can get support, make a payment and order and manage products independently. The storefront catalog is tailored to specific customers depending on their line of business, industry or country.

Robert Cioffi, co-founder of Yonkers, NY-based Progressive Computing, thinks the storefronts feature “is a very interesting play.”

“That will help us with some our larger partners who have an IT director that may want to do a little bit of self-service or have a more custom experience with us,” he told CRN. “It’s easy to deliver a technical solution, it’s easy to fix systems but it’s quite another to deliver a high-touch customer experience.”

Paco Lebron, founder and CEO of Chicago-based MSP ProdigyTek, said he’s most excited about the opportunity explorer feature.

“I do love the storefront on being able to create that marketplace that can be self-service for a client,” he said. “It allows for more flexibility but also for ease of use and a frictionless sales process. It’ll help [customer]s adopt some of those tools a little bit faster.”

The revamped cloud marketplace will be available in North America and EMEA on June 17 and June 18 in the APAC region. Partners at the Beyond conference were given exclusive access to the marketplace this week.