What's an MSP? Pax8 wants to de-mystify IT channel

Pax8 is on a mission to help the business and investment world better understand the global IT channel with an online documentary series.

The Pax8 series, MSP Legends, follows the cloud marketplace company’s community and ecosystems corporate vice president Rob Rae as he talks to managed service providers across the world.

Rae told techpartner.news that the purpose of the series was “to try to capture the essence of the channel”.

“How does the MSP channel work? Most people that are in this space, who have come from other industries, recognise that the managed services space globally is different than pretty much any other industry that they've ever worked in.”

He said even as the demand for IT services for small to medium businesses grows worldwide, the channel and MSPs are still unfamiliar concepts to many people.

While the series aims to improve broad understanding of the global MSP community, Rae said investors were a specific target audience.

“It's not only end users that don't understand, or it's not common knowledge, what a managed service provider is, it's also the investors. It's also the people that are trying to, and should, find this space to make investments in here.”

“There's obviously a ton of private equity, venture capital – a lot of investments – coming into our space. But there it gets incredibly difficult to try to capture and describe what the channel is, what the community is, how the collaboration actually works, to somebody that's never experienced it.”

“The investment community doesn't necessarily understand what these things are, and I think that has an impact on stock price and investments that a lot of people are making.”

Pax8’s video series aims to show that the industry is growing at pace, has a strong global community around it, and that MSPs tend to be similar, despite there being relatively little competition for clients between them, according to Rae.

“If you think about a typical MSP, regardless of where they are on the globe, they're basically using the same tools (and) they're basically growing their businesses very similarly. A lot of the trends, for example, like cloud or cybersecurity and now AI, are very similar, regardless where you go.”

In Rae’s view, MSPs are different in the services they provide or verticals they operate in, but they are all benefitting from a rising tide.

“Small and medium businesses, the ultimate end users, are outsourcing IT faster and more than ever before, so there is a plethora of business to be had out there.”