The Co-founder of Pax8 has labelled AWS a “friend not foe” following claims the hyperscaler should be regarded as a distributor.
In a keynote at the Canalys Forums EMEA last week, Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards described AWS Marketplace as “one of the biggest distributors in EMEA and globally”.
Sales of third party software via hyperscaler marketplaces will reach $85bn by 2028, the analyst predicts, with CrowdStrike among the vendors to have sold over $1bn via the largest and most mature of these – AWS Marketplace – alone.
“They are acting as a distributor,” Edwards said of AWS on stage at the event.
“It’s a friend”
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen at the event, Pax8 Chief Strategy Officer Ryan Walsh said he understood why Canalys sees AWS Marketplace as a ‘distributor’ in the context of multi-million pound enterprise purchases.
But he was quick to brand the hyperscalers as “friends”, noting that AWS and Microsoft are both “advancing the ways in which we co-exist”. Pax8 serves SMB-focused MSPs.
Asked whether he saw AWS as a competitor, Walsh replied “not at all”.
“If you look at the appeal of that [hyperscaler marketplace] model, it’s out of reach for an SMB – they’re not going to be drawn to a commit credit for [millions of dollars],” he said.
“When we talk about an open ecosystem – this connection or transaction layer through APIs – part of that plumbing is between us and the hyperscalers.
“Microsoft has seen our assistance in helping with those vendors that are on their marketplace and bringing that into our community of partners in the long tail of SME. We have an API layer that allows us to deliver that solution to our marketplace through that connection, and that’s why it’s a friend.
“If we didn’t have a way to do that then we might see it differently.”
AWS is advancing the way it coexists with Pax8 in areas such as billing, Walsh claimed.
“To support the structure of those multiple mouths is a very complex thing and we see the hyperscalers are recognising that,” he said.
Phylip Morgan, Chief Revenue Officer, Pax8 EMEA, put it more bluntly, comparing AWS to a supermarket, however.
“It’s no different than Walmart,” he said.
“Building something that outlives us”
Walsh’s comments come after Pax8 – which can itself be touchy about being labelled a ‘distributor’ – appointed Scott Chasin as its new CEO in May and launched a new Cloud Marketplace in June.
“As somebody [who built Pax8] in the basement, it’s critical for me that we’re building something that outlives us,” Walsh said of the decision to promote Chasin to the top job after he joined as CTO in 2021.
“Scott came in and created a vision for what the marketplace could be for the future. We realised we had to embrace it even more and become a product-led company.”
Where Pax8 traditionally worked with no more than a few vendors in each software segment, the idea now is to give MSPs and their SMBs customers AI-driven recommendations based on a much wider choice of technologies, Walsh explained.
“Our plan is to add more and more options in terms of products, so this marketplace needs to enable that,” he said.
The new focus on data insights and AI will not come at the cost of Pax8’s focus on relationship management, Walsh stressed, however.
“If you don’t have that enablement you’re going to have an empty mall,” he said.
“There’s self-service and touchless in many parts of this buying journey. But you still need someone to help manage the relationship, guide the partner and help get them started and skill them up so they can have a conversation with the customer about security or AI. We believe in that deeply.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
