Pax8 Beyond Gets Rolling in their Inaugural Event

Rob Rae is a rockstar in the channel industry, and even more to the partners at this Beyond event. And, as you'd suspect, he was first to take the stage. A recognizable face to everyone in the room, started their inaugural event with a fast overview of the company that aims to disrupt the distribution landscape through their focus on the Pax8 marketplace.

Nick Heddy gave some history of this event and the Pax8 business. Their attempt to spin it up a few years ago and how Covid took it out. Their focus is on disrupting the IT industry, how they'll do it, and the impact their marketplace will have on the industry. He also introduced a friend of the industry known by many, Jay McBain.

Jay McBain has been on a mission in the past year (or longer) to show how the channel and partnerships are evolving into an ecosystem of vendors, alliances, and partnerships all working together to meet the variety of needs of buyers in different verticals, regions, delivery specialties, and a changing buying cycle. B2B decision-making is changing to a 28-moment buying journey, much like the B2C journey and it's accelerating quickly. The point to purchase is in the first 30 days and then retain them. The journey for sellers changes to Influence -> Land -> Expand. The influence stage means more than ever before. The number one thing that provides a consumer the willingness to change is your ability to integrate with other important software for the business. Every company becomes a tech company in this changing landscape.

Multipliers are becoming a strong focus in the partnership arena. The primary question is how much hardware investment is turning into how much bolt-on revenue? For every $1 spent, how much is being generated in total...the multiplier. In MSP, for every $1 of hardware infrastructure invested, about an additional $1 is generated in services.

Marketplaces, after the pandemic, have had staying power. Cloud marketplaces are expected to grow rapidly. The ability to make more money, wrapped around the multipliers, and wrapped around the new buyer journey, is giving the services industry a strong way forward.

CrowdStrike 's Daniel Bernard , their Chief Business Officer next took the stage. Nick Heddy announced that Crowdstrike was a focused provider within the Pax8 ecosystem. They took the stage to talk about their security offer, a notion that cybersecurity has got to be fast. Are you a "watch" person or a "calendar" person? Does your cybersecurity move fast enough? Are you faster than the bad actor trying to break into your client's organization? From Crowdstrike, we heard the soundbite of the Keynote, "Good Enough in Security is Never Good Enough." Are you done with missed detections? During this conversation, Crowdstrike laid down the gauntlet with the claim they are top in the industry, identified by Gartner, and went about the business of convincing the attendees of their claim. Interestingly, it seemed pretty persuasive.

Crowdstrike certainly had the attention of the audience as a huge number of attendees snapped pictures of their presentation, and claimed "Crowdstrike is the ecosystem of the cyber industry." They showed the partners they were working with, and the products they offered and said "These will all be available on the Pax8 marketplace."

Finally, a security panel, moderated by the man with THE beard, Matt Lee, CISSP, CCSP, CFR, PNPT . The panel consists of @Adam Gray from PILR , @Chris Moores from Proofpoint , @James Griffin from Redstor , and Jon Clay at 趋势科技 . They answered questions like:

"How has the growing knowledge of Cybersecurity changed how we develop, market, and sell solutions?" First, more people know what it is, why it's important, and maybe most importantly, it's making these solutions better. "If your cybersecurity company says they can solve 100% of the problems, you should throw them out right then and there."

"How does the maturity of threats demand a maturity of the landscape?" Threat agents are using cybersecurity provider tools against them. They are evolving as quickly as the companies are providing solutions. The cybersecurity companies continue to grow and evolve, however, the threat agents are expanding their footprint as well to a wider group of companies. "It's a cat-and-mouse world." It requires that the landscape mature as quickly, or more quickly than the threat agent landscape. And, keep up on the basics, the blocking and tackling, that keeps the majority of threats away from your business.

"What does 'secure by design; secure by default' mean?" Backup MUST work and be retrievable. Malware scanning should be bundled into the solution. If you start a new set of code, realize it's going to be in the system for 3-5 years - possibly 10 years later. Consider it when you're creating your systems & environment. Make sure you're protecting at the level of the individuals. Don't give admin access at the individual PC level or threat agents will enter your system through your developer environment. If you're a company that installs, be conservative, and default with security protocols turned "on" instead of "off".

Hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) next took the stage with Francessca Vasquez talking about technology strategies that are resilient to change. She immediately encouraged the audience to "lean into the cloud" for business success. From a recent 麦肯锡 report, "75% of cloud's predicted value comes from boosting innovation." Companies need to have the ability to innovate rapidly. Where does innovation come from? Start with the customer and work your way backward. Be customer obsessed, provide high-quality, high-velocity decisions, and be experimental and disruptive.

In a standing-room-only startup to the Pax8 Beyond event, where everything Pax8 does is partnership-led, it's bound to be an outstanding couple of days with a company that embraces channel and disrupts the way these service providers can and will go to market.

#pax8beyond #cybersecurity #msp #msppartners #crowdstrike #aws #community #clouddistribution #cloud