Pax8 Partners ‘Blown Away’ By ‘Awesome’ Pax8 Pro

‘The insight that you’re going to get into the tools that you’re using, the Microsoft product that you’re already using, I think it’s really going to be a game-changer for for the industry,’ says Techvera President Justin Dews of the new product, Pax8 Pro.

Pax8 has debuted its first product for MSPs, dubbed Pax8 Pro, which is designed to augment the tools solution providers use through automation and enhanced visibility across their networks revealing blind spots that some miss.

Pax8 Pro – which will cost an MSP $250 per month -- integrates with Microsoft 365 and other tools to give MSPs visibility into unused licenses, where multi-factor authentication is turned off, and automation features that onboard and offboard users seamlessly across the provider’s network, the company and partners

“The key to all of this is simplifying the journey for the MSP,” said Pax8 CEO and founder John Street. “I want to emphasize that because one of the real opportunities we always saw with the distribution market was everybody was talking about profitability for the MSP. The prime driver of profitability is butts in seats. If you make their journey really easy, they can afford to put on more clients and do more with less. That’s really been our mantra all along is to keep making it easier and easier.”

Pax8 Chief Technology Officer Michael Dehmlow said Pax8 Pro plugs the gaps that exist between tool sets that MSPs use.

“Pax8 Pro is really there to augment that experience and make the ecosystem function more effectively for MSPs,” he told CRN. “We think the PSA tools serve an important function, but we’re augmenting that function and streamlining it. So we’re trying to raise all boats. We look at the MSP, and their issues. We look at our vendors and their issues and we say how can Pax8 be a wingman to all these parties to give everyone the time back they need to grow their business?”

Justin Dews, president of Techvera, a Denton, Texas-based MSP, was in the audience that got an early look at the tool, which he said stunned the small group who saw it.

“Around the room, there was just jaws dropping,” he said. “Literally like, ‘Oh, my God, this is awesome. I can’t believe you guys came up with this. Like, this is amazing. You are going to revolutionize the industry.’ Those were the words coming out of people’s mouths.”

He described Pax8 Pro as having a level one tech that performs all of the detailed work around onboarding and offboarding new users and synchronizing them across the MSPs various toolsets.

“When I automate, now, I’m taking some steps or some points of failure out of a process that normally a human would have to do,” he said. “So we’re capturing all of these steps of onboarding or off boarding. We’re capturing the steps of assigning licenses, unassigning licenses and all those things.”

Unused licenses are a drain on an MSPs cash flow and the Pax8 Pro dashboard gives businesses visibility into those as well.

“What happens when I forget to remove the license? I‘m still getting billed for it. So I’m losing money, because my tech forgot to follow up on a piece of that process,” he said. “So with Pax8 Pro, that’s going to allow me to see at a very a dashboard level, how many clients I have, that have licenses being consumed from non active users.”

MachineLogic CEO Daniel Johnson was part of the group that had early access and said he was “blown away” by Pax8 Pro. Because of its strong monitoring capabilities, Pax8 Pro makes it easy for MSPs to keep customers “at their desired security state.”

“There‘s some real, real key wins there,” Johnson said. “On the security equation, being able to see the security state of a couple of key pieces of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is really helpful. Being able to see MFA status across a single customer or multiple customers. That’s very, very helpful and it’s a little difficult to see that without a tool like Pax8 Pro … Getting them to a desired security state and then monitoring that to keep them in that in that desired security state, that is a great value on this one.”

Johnson called Pax8 Pro a “missing toolset” that MSPs who are invested in cloud and SaaS products can use to manage those products.

“We’ve had PSA and RMM tools for years and years and years. But now, the MSP community is really starting to need tools around cloud and SaaS management, and workflow automation for that provisioning, that we talked about,” he said. “There might be other solutions out there that can do it for enterprise customers that can identify how much are they spending across a bunch of different vertical solutions, but there hasn’t really been anything at the MSP-level to give us not only the insight that we need, but also some tooling to make our practices a little bit more efficient.”

Dews said with Pax8 he can log in to one portal that tells him where he is losing money on licenses, where his technicians can onboard and offboard users easily through automation, is a “game-changer.”

“The insight that you’re going to get into the tools that you’re using, the Microsoft product that you’re already using, I think it’s really going to be a game-changer for for the industry,” he said. “They’re really, going to make some other distributors open their eyes as to what’s going on.”