667 The Future of IT: Cloud, AI, and Beyond

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here, wrapping up at PAX 8 Beyond. I'm here on Radio Row and it's starting to thin out a little bit as we end some of the sessions and get ready for the festivities, the closing keynote, the vendor awards, and of course, the big party with the special guest that Rob Ray claims is still a secret, but it's not, but we're not telling. So as we wrap up here, I told you guys we were going to be doing the PAX 8 portion and I have with me another member of the PAX 8 family, Simon Green, CIO of the show.

So Simon, welcome to the podcast. Nice to be here. All right.

So you, my friend, can talk about PAX 8 from the other side, because usually I ask questions about how, you know, PAX 8 can help us as MSPs and what can we do, blah, blah, blah. But you're dealing with technology from the PAX 8 side. I am the inside baseball game.

We should probably explain that to the listeners here. Yeah. So I'm the Chief Information Officer for PAX 8. That means that I look after all the technology that everyone with a PAX8.com email address has.

So all our employees all around the world. All right. So let me just go ahead and ask, are there different technologies that you guys are using apart from what the MSPs are using, or is there some overlap that we can kind of understand? That's an interesting question.

So as PAX 8 has grown, it's gone through a few evolutions on the technology front. Where we're at now, just under 2,000 people, we've kind of gone outside of some of the types of tech that we were using in the smaller days, and we no longer necessarily work on the same stacks that maybe our MSPs or the customers of our MSPs, certainly for the most part, would be on simply because there's different needs, like very different deviation around governance or scalability or enterprise-style systems, like very different at that scale. So we're kind of going through the transition right now, growing up.

Now I imagine that being CIO for a vendor is much different than we utilize CIOs in our respect. Did you come up through the MSP ranks to get to the role? Did you come from outside, another vertical? How did that happen? So I came to PAX 8 through acquisition. I actually, me and two co-founders who are still with PAX 8 as well, built a company called Wirehive, which was a managed hosting company in the UK.

And it was about 12 years of that journey, and that went through a very interesting era because it went from the traditional on-prem infrastructure, Colo in the data center, through the emergence of cloud being prevalent, AWS became a viable option during that journey, and then to the point where everything was pure cloud onwards, really. So we went through the whole transition there, but yes, that was a much smaller business. And I came in as PAX 8, started to expand outside the US.

Wirehive was PAX 8's first toehold outside of the US back in 2020. Okay. So, thus, the start of the global, I don't want to say dominance of PAX 8, but we'll get there.

All right. So again, a nice little transition to move up to here. So from that perspective, you weren't dealing with MSPs as clients at that time, right? Well, no, not MSPs, but a very similar type of business.

So Wirehive's bread and butter was the marketing agency world. And there's a lot in common, I think, between MSPs and marketing agencies. But the way that we based our business was we would partner with a marketing agency and their customers would become customers of ours.

So we had a kind of a triangular relationship going on. Marketing agencies want to build campaigns, they want to build, ship, and then move on to the next. So we took on the managed part that the marketing agencies didn't necessarily want to concern themselves with.

So it's a similar environment. It's still channeled, but not quite the same. All right.

So what little secret nuggets that would be nice for us as MSPs to know that PAX 8 is doing internally? Well, probably one interesting thing would be that we've actually gone sort of in and out and back in again on the total line of business systems. So a lot of MSPs, for example, they're going to use ConnectWise, maybe, or a similar system. And if they follow the blueprints, they'll go all in on that system and they'll architect their whole business around it.

That's a system that is very tailored to how managed service providers work and what they need. That model of working doesn't just exist in the MSP world. So for example, we run on ServiceNow, and we're on a journey at the moment to get from a plethora of systems that have happened organically while we've built to consolidate towards ServiceNow in a very similar way to the way an MSP might be going on a journey to consolidate into ConnectWise.

It's just at a very different scale, a very different sort of tool. But it's a very recognizable journey, I would say, but in order of magnitude larger. So some MSPs, they understand that because some of them are starting to look at ServiceNow or they'll look at 365 Dynamics, Salesforce.

So I mean, I can understand that to a degree. Most of us are smaller. We like to stay inside the ecosystem.

So it's interesting to know that PAX 8, yes, we would have to assume that we'd have to utilize a bigger size. Small businesses in most verticals don't have a line of business system like ConnectWise that they can go all in on. I think MSPs are actually quite fortunate that they have access to that because they've got a field of blueprints, they've got experts like our academy team who can guide them through all of that, how to run your business and help you understand the fundamentals.

Most businesses don't have that. So most businesses who find themselves in ServiceNow have probably gone through the 100, 200 different SaaS products with Trello and Jira and WorkBoard and PowerApps and all sorts, all at the same time. And then they have to try and consolidate back towards it.

We're at the moment trying to get down from, well, I think at a peak we were around 350 SaaS apps in total that we were using internally at PAX 8, and we're whittling that right down now. Nice. So let me ask a question on, you came from the European side, so of course most of us here in the U.S. don't understand the relationship.

We know PAX 8 is going global. We know that there's a big market outside of the U.S. What do you see as either positives or nice hurdles to come in terms of making it work across all the different countries and stuff? So in EMEA, across Europe, there isn't really the plethora of MSP community that there is in the U.S. Really? It's just not quite the same. Okay.

There is a huge community over here, and a huge value in that community, and the members of it put a lot of value in it, and they get a lot from each other. Now these things do exist in Europe and the U.K., they do exist. But they are pockets, and they're a lot newer.

The MSP community over here is deeply entrenched, and it's been there since the early 2000s really, possibly earlier. From my understanding, you probably know better than I do. But that's come together a lot more recently in the EMEA region, and we're a big part of that.

There's a good opportunity there for PAX 8 to kind of go on the same journey as we did with the U.S. and be a supporting player in that. And it's going well. It's great.

Do you find that other countries have to adjust when it comes to that in terms of PAX 8 members here in the U.S., PAX 8 members in, like I met people from the Netherlands and New Zealand and Australia, yes, they're part of the PAX 8 family, but does it all gel? Well, I'd say the way PAX 8 works internationally is it's almost like three businesses, Americas, EMEA, and APAC. It's not. We are all one company, but we're at different stages, different scales, with very different cultural nuances and cultural requirements.

And so we do operate quite distinctly between the three regions. There are not just in terms of how we go to market and how we approach people in the wild, but in terms of how we operate internally and how we run our offices and how we hire and everything. It's very interesting being in a business that is in 27 countries.

It's a hell of a lot of nuance you've got to take on. Well, that's why I wanted to ask that question because, you know, Americans, you know, we're, what is the term? We're, you know, arrogant. I didn't say it.

It's all about us. And seeing this global market now and trying to understand, you know, how things operate outside the U.S. is sometimes just as important to what we do because we are going to be a global market. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I definitely see a huge amount of variety, you know, speaking inside PAX 8. A good example would be how our sales teams operate in the U.S. versus how our sales teams operate in Southeast Asia. So in Southeast Asia, they are on the road all day.

They're spending 80% of their time at the office and they are visiting their partners face to face in their offices where they are all in office. Not here. Traveling all the time.

Over here, it's all by telephone. You may never meet them. And it's not just a geographic thing.

It's cultural expectations, cultural norms. That's the way they want to work. And I think the partners who we're meeting in some of the Southeast Asian countries, they want you to be in their office.

They want you to come and knock at the door. Not over here. Very different.

Very different. Yeah. Huge amount of nuance.

It's been a very interesting learning. That's for sure. All right.

So PAX 8 Beyond, of course, becoming one of the premier conferences out there. Are you going to be attending the Berlin one in October? Absolutely. Yeah.

I will be there. What do you think is going to be the acceptance there versus what's happened here? Because the growth here from last year to this year was huge. So it's interesting for us.

We're doing this in Berlin, but actually Germany is a relatively new market for us. But it's also a very reachable place for people in Europe. It's very easy to get to, very accessible.

Most people, most IT companies, MSPs in Europe, they don't know who we are yet. So it's a lot earlier in the journey, I think. So a lot of outreach, a lot of introductions.

Oh, yes. A lot of who are we. It's very different to how we're working over here.

UK, we've got a bit more of a toehold there now, a bit more established there. But mainland Europe and places like the Dachau region especially, and definitely down in southwest Europe as well, they don't know who we are. So we're new to them.

So to be running a conference when people don't know what our name is, that's an interesting challenge. You've really got to pull people. Credit to the team there for what they're doing.

They're trying to recreate this level of buzz and this level of community and bring people together for the community, but it is new to them. So I'm sitting here talking to you and we're talking about all these things, and in my mind I'm thinking, okay, most CIOs would not have that much depth of information about that sort of a thing. So it sounds like you actually could be working right alongside of Rob Ray in expanding Pax8 into these other regions and helping him.

I mean, he's Canadian, but he's really American because I don't see him being able to translate in the European market or the Asian market or anything. Yeah, so we have our own Rob Rays. So I think Rob will be there, but we've got people like Phil Morgan, who is, I guess, the Rob Ray of the UK.

There are other Rob Rays around the world, but yeah, we're building our own fame there as well. All right. And we've brought people in who have been part of that channel and community for a long time.

So I mentioned Phil Morgan, for example, he was C-Staff in a business that was actually ended up being acquired by ConnectWise, but part of a big group of MSPs in the UK called Network Group, very entrenched in that. So the communities do exist, but they're more organized around commercial structures and partnerships. Okay.

Yeah. Simon, this has been quite interesting. I wish I had planned better and had better questions for you.

I've got about five more minutes, if you like. Do you have five more minutes of content for me? I don't know what to talk about, really. I don't know.

I'm trying to think. I mean, I like going down some of these roads, hearing about PAX 8 behind the scenes. We hear what's on stage, what is relevant directly to us, but never really thought about what's happening behind the scenes to make PAX 8 work everywhere else, in a sense, seamlessly and all of that.

It's a very interesting challenge. I mentioned we're just shy of 2,000 people. If you had 2,000 people in one office building, you would be a very well-structured, big, mature business where everything would be in order.

Well, we've got 2,000 people spread very thin around the world. It's a little bit like running three businesses within one business, or more sometimes. The challenges that we're trying to navigate are, how do you bring cohesion when you've got a territory that you've only been in for just over two years and a territory that you've been in for a decade, and try and bring cohesion in process, marketing, everything.

It's tough. It's not as intuitive as you might think it is. Technical support, for example.

You might think, what is there to deviate with technical support? Support is support, right? Support is support, right. Not when the language that they answer the call is different, not when the way that they treat people is different. You can't just hand a call off to someone else in another country and expect the person who's called in to have their expectations met.

There's more nuance to it than that. We're operating technical support at the regional level. It has centralized governance over it.

There is a central core governance for how we technically operate, but the delivery is left up to the regional leaders to put their nuance into and the exact how do you do it. Same goes for sales. Marketing, obviously, are highly culturally nuanced, so it's a big challenge.

Let me ask this, and I don't know if you can answer or not, but the fact that the big announcement about Marketplace. Of course, here in the U.S., everybody was excited. Were you in the room? I was in the room.

That was a hell of a reaction. Yeah. I know that it's going live for all partners around the world next week, but the question is, is the rest of the world as excited about Marketplace as we are? I'd like to think so.

I don't know. That's for sure. I think it's interesting, the tooling that we're creating and the cohesion that we're bringing around that environment.

You've obviously been in the industry for a fair time, so you'll probably remember an era where vendors would go through this motion of putting marketing tools in front of you to do things like, here's the tool to make a banner campaign, here's the tool to make an email campaign, here's the tool to make your microsite. Yes. And no one ever did it.

Of course not. I've got to log in, I've got to download stuff, I've got to follow templates. The difference with what we're doing is it's not a microsite for one vendor, so I don't think this has actually existed before.

This is, I want to create a set of tooling to engage my customers, and it's not pegged to one vendor. It's not like you're tying your fate to them. This is my Microsoft microsite.

This is the storefront for my business. And you can create, you can curate your experience, how you want it to be presented to your customers, and it doesn't matter what you're delivering behind the scenes. So yeah, very interesting future.

Very interesting. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, should be good.

All right. I'm really trying to think of what else. Here's the problem.

I don't know what happens behind the scenes at Backstage, so it's like, what in the world to ask? I can tell you another interesting thing, and then I'm probably out of time after that. When you're growing a managed service provider, you go through interesting stages of scaling. At the start, you're one guy doing everything.

And inevitably, you probably hire, well, it depends how you're biased, I guess. You might hire a salesperson, or you might hire a technical person. A tech or an admin.

Yeah. One way or the other. Depends on what your personal bias is, I would say, right? But you start building out a team around you.

And then those individuals then become departments. And there is an inflection point where the department that you have built to deliver the service to your customers no longer can manage in their head all of the knowledge that is needed for all of those customers. Okay.

So at that point, people start to introduce pods, or teams, or affinity groups, or whatever you want to call them in your particular business. You familiar with what I'm talking about? I am. You might have a red team, and a blue team, and a green team.

You have alpha, beta. You reach that scale point. That's where we're at with Pax8, with our internal technology as well.

I was going to ask, is that where you were going? Is that what you were doing? Exactly. Trying to manage all of that, where you have to... Yeah. I thought it's an interesting thing, because from my background in the managed provider world, that's also a journey that we had to go on.

And now I'm looking at it is thinking, I've seen this one before. I know how this one ends. So yeah, we're going through that same journey internally with how we provide internal technology and aligning the internal technology teams to the internal customers.

All right. It may not be revelatory to some, but I thought it was an interesting... Well, somebody will email me about that. They'll be like, dude, that's what I'm doing now.

So it'll come up. But Simon, thank you very much. No worries.

Happy to. Like I said, I wish I'd have been more prepared, but you gave some great insight, some great analogies, and I look forward to seeing Pax8 over the next 18 months, because the last 18 was good. Happy to meet you.

All right, sir. So we're going to do it, and we're going to wrap up here at PAX 8 Beyond, and I hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you soon.

And until next time, holla!