‘When partners build these integrations, they stop reacting and start anticipating. They’re able to understand what’s happening across their customers’ businesses, sometimes before the customer does. That’s the kind of visibility that transforms a transactional relationship into a trusted advisory relationship,’ says Libby McIlhany, Pax8’s chief product officer.
Pax8 is transforming its cloud marketplace from a procurement engine into an operating platform for MSPs with new capabilities to help partners better understand their businesses, anticipate customer needs and drive growth.
The new capabilities include subscription intelligence, business analytics, reporting and integrations, giving MSPs a real-time view into revenue, client health, subscription activity and financial performance from a single platform.
“We’ve actually been turning the Pax8 marketplace into something it really hasn’t been before,” Libby McIlhany, Pax8’s chief product officer, told a crowd during the Denver-based company’s Beyond conference in Salt Lake City this week. “For years, the marketplace has been where your procurement and your operations live. Your leadership team might hear about it secondhand through a report, a quarterly business review or a conversation with someone on the team. That changes today. We’re turning the Pax8 marketplace into the strategic operating layer for your leadership…the single view where your revenue, your client health, your financial data and your forward-looking subscription intelligence all live together.”
[Related: Pax8 Launches New AI Offerings To Help MSPs Build Managed Intelligence Practices]
She said the shift is about helping MSPs strengthen customer trust by eliminating surprises, improving business visibility and giving partners the data they need to enter client conversations with specific recommendations. That level of preparation, she said, makes MSPs not only more efficient but more credible.
Among the new capabilities: subscription insights — which provides visibility into renewals — Microsoft trial activity, commitment terms, and subscription changes. Partners can now view renewals across 30-, 60- and 90-day windows and gain greater control over Microsoft auto-conversions and trial management.
The new Partner Analytics Hub consolidates revenue, product and customer data into a single analytics experience, while Reports offers reporting tools that can be customized, downloaded and automatically delivered to stakeholders. Pax8 also launched Integration Guides featuring step-by-step instructions for leveraging Pax8 APIs and its Model Context Protocol server, accompanied by an AI-powered prompt generator.
According to McIlhany (pictured), these additions help MSPs move beyond managing day-to-day operations and toward proactively advising clients.
“When partners build these integrations, they stop reacting and start anticipating,” she said. “They’re able to understand what’s happening across their customers’ businesses, sometimes before the customer does. That’s the kind of visibility that transforms a transactional relationship into a trusted advisory relationship.”
The marketplace expansion comes as Pax8 continues pushing MSPs toward the managed intelligence era. Craig Donovan, chief experience officer at Pax8, said MSPs are facing a unique moment where AI innovation and growing customer demand are converging.
“What used to take five years now feels a lot closer to 18 months,” he said. “The speed of AI development is accelerating, but just as importantly, your customers are catching up. That’s creating a window of opportunity, and windows don’t stay open forever.”
He added that many MSPs have already begun transforming their own businesses through automation and AI, but the next challenge is helping customers achieve similar outcomes.
“Customer Zero is when you’re transforming your own business,” he said. “Customer One is when you start transforming your clients. That’s the real opportunity. Everything we’re announcing is designed around that moment…helping MSPs take what they’ve learned internally and turn it into services, outcomes and revenue streams for customers.”
Robert Paradise said Pax8’s strategy of bringing enterprise-grade AI capabilities into a simplified marketplace experience will help him deliver more value to customers who historically lacked access to advanced technology.
“It’s going to give us enterprise-class access to the small business market,” Paradise, founder and CEO of Providence, R.I.-based Pax8 partner Attain Technology, told CRN. “It’s a wonderful opportunity not only for us as MSPs but for our clients. We’re going to be able to give them tools that they never would have had access to before.”
He added that Pax8’s growing investment in AI agents could significantly reduce deployment challenges for MSPs.
“They’re taking some of the heavy lifting off our shoulders,” he said. “That means we can deploy solutions faster, give our clients more capabilities and bring everything into the same billing cycle. It simplifies the process for us and helps us deliver value much more quickly.”
Katherine Gray’s biggest takeaway was the AI monetization piece.
“It’s going to give us an easier way to generate recurring revenue from agents and have everything in one place instead of jumping between multiple systems,” Gray, operations manager for Birmingham, Ala.-based Warren Averett, told CRN. “From an operational standpoint, that’s huge because it gives us a clearer picture of what’s happening across the business and helps us make better decisions faster.”
And she sees the value beyond the MSP as well. “From a client perspective, I think it’s just going to make it easier to operate,” she said. “The more efficiently we can manage our business and our services, the better experience we’re able to deliver to our customers.”
