Inside Pax8’s APAC leadership shakeup

Lindsay Zwart, Pax8's new EVP and GM of APAC, wants to help the company tap into the untapped opportunities across the region in her new role.

Zwart was named to the position as Chris Sharp moves into a global role, being appointed tas senior vice president for business development, but will remain based in Australia.

Zwart said being able to build on Sharp’s expansion work over the last four years was part of what drew her to the position.

“I've run billion dollar businesses, but they were existing businesses within a large scale environment," she said.

"The opportunity to join a region that has been grown through Chris's amazing work across seven countries [now becomes] thinking about how do we amplify that, how do we really multiply our presence within the region, making sure we're improving our brand, our partner ecosystem support."

She added that her experience working in tech companies in various countries will help expand Pax8 into the multicultural region that is Asia Pacific.

Most recently, Zwart spent four years as the chief enterprise officer for Vodafone New Zealand (now One NZ), overseeing the telco’s efforts to expand its ICT capability through the region.

Prior to that, she was at Microsoft for over a decade, working her way up from a NZ-based services manager to the general manager and chief operations officer for its US cloud and enterprise business.

“Having worked in multiple different countries, including South Africa and Holland, understanding cultures, understanding the challenges and the opportunities of each of those different markets, I think I'm able to leverage that experience across the APAC region," she told techpartner.news.

"For me, that's actually the most exciting part of doing this role; the opportunity to think about what specific requirements do we need within each of these countries, and how do we build that to suit those partners and then their end customers."

Like Zwart, Sharp also has a decade at Microsoft under his belt, finishing up with the company in 2013 as partner sales lead for Asia, based in Singapore.

He said geographic expansion would be just one part of his new role.

“I'm going to be looking at all sorts of opportunities for the organisation," he said.

"It might be geographic expansion, it might be new products, it might be relationships with new vendors – it's a whole catch bag of different things.

“The thing that I bring is emerging market experience, having done 20 years of living in Singapore, living in that melting pot and understanding what is happening in really large markets like China and India, and then also mature markets like Australia and Singapore.

"I now get to bring that experience to the rest of the world and then go and help my counterparts - my colleagues like Lindsay - to open up new things that they may not have the time to do because they're so focused on the markets that we're currently in.”

Pax8 co-founder talks up Marketplace success

Pax8 co-founder and chief strategy officer Ryan Walsh told techpartner.news that the company had big plans for its Pax8 Marketplace to win new customers across the globe.

Last year, the company unveiled its Marketplace, enabling MSPs to identify sales opportunities through AI and create their own white-labelled storefronts. 

He said Pax8 had 150 vendors on its marketplace, 86 of which are transacting in Australia, and a further 1,000 vendors waiting to get in.

It has been evolving beyond a traditional marketplace, Walsh explained, using data and data insights to help partners and their clients find products they may want.

“We introduced features like Opportunity Explorer, where we utilise data and make a suggestion by looking at purchase telemetry that we had in our marketplace and showing this to a partner to guide them with a specific customer on what they may be interested in next,” he said.

“What we found in terms of the adoption is that the revenue increase for partners using Opportunity Explorer is 52%, so for those who are taking advantage of that, they are finding opportunities where there were gaps."

Another feature that has been introduced is Storefronts, which Walsh said was “misunderstood” at launch as many partners saw it as replacing the service they offer to their customers.

“But as we started tracking trends, we realised that customers wanted more of a self service experience," he explained.

"We believe that was being influenced by a B2C experience with Amazon and what we were trying to educate our partners around is that didn't mean that they didn't need the partner, but they did want a degree of self service; they didn't want to be sold to.

"So we added the Storefronts, and [we're] pleased to say that the numbers that we're tracking with those partners that are using Storefronts, they've increased their order value 123%.”

He explained that the Storefronts have also been made public, meaning potential customers can see the storefront without a login and still register that interest as a lead.

Pax8 also added support for the model context protocol to the integration hub, which makes partners’ marketplaces discoverable by AI agents.

The three execs emphasised Pax8’s focus on supporting channel partners, particularly through its dedicated guided growth programme, which Walsh described as a "tailored journey" for each partner toward enablement in a certain area.

He added while there were many partners who were advanced with AI, for example, it was particularly important for those who weren’t to get up to speed.

“We're telling our partners, pay attention," he said.

"There's a new buyer, and the adoption here is really why you need to take advantage of this now. Get in the game. Don't wait. So it's more than just hey, we have this programme out there. It says, Start it now, because you'll miss this opportunity if you wait.”