Pax8 President And COO On Why Smaller MSPs Have An ‘Advantage’ For Change

Nick Heddy explains why smaller MSPs have a unique opportunity when it comes to AI and change management.

Dealing with change and transformation is hard for every organization, but smaller MSPs have an advantage, according to Nick Heddy, president and COO at Pax8.

Speaking to CRN Australia, he said that if you’re a big business, change management is a lot harder.

"If you’re a small business, you have an advantage because you can get everybody together on the couch and do a change management training, and it’s a little bit different than creating a schedule across hundreds of thousands of employees across many geographies,” he said.

“This is a unique opportunity for partners and customers because there is no inherent advantage of being bigger and having more resources.

“In fact, it’s a little bit of a disadvantage, and so this is an opportunity for SMB to thrive, be first adopters, be first movers, first to market, to transform their business. I’m seeing examples of that all over Australia and New Zealand.”

Heddy has seen MSPs that have used autonomous agents, seeing productivity gains and are not laying off any employees.

“We’ve got approximately one million customers, we’re not seeing any SaaS compression or anybody who is downsizing,” he said.

“It’s the opposite. We’re seeing people deploy agents and then deploy the tools that those agents need.”

Looking at the SMB market, Heddy is optimistic.

“For the partners who are serving this segment, I don’t want to overestimate it, but people are saying this could be five to 10 times of the total addressable market (TAM) that we see today.

“That the TAM is estimated to be currently $777 billion for small business, $592 billion for enterprise. For the first time, it’s being reported that the SMB segment is larger and is growing faster.”

Heddy noted that SMBs aren’t following the trend of “big business” where they replace human beings with agents, in fact, he is seeing something else.

“The trend I see more often is if I’m a 10-person company I can compete like I’m a 20 [person company]. If I’m a 25 [person company] I look like and act like I’m a 50-person organization,” he said.

Views On APAC Region

Looking at the local market, Heddy called the APAC region, one of the “most agile regions.”

“They want to be the first to adopt. They’re early to cross the chasm from the innovator’s dilemma. They’re always so keen on competing on a global scale, and so I’m absolutely seeing that as I’m talking to partners in the APAC region,” he said.

“They’re first to just jump in, try it. They don’t want to be stagnant and standing still. They’re figuring out lots of innovative ways and different ways than I was thinking on how to monetize AI.”

Heddy said the “funnest” part of his job is talking to partners and hearing what they are doing in terms of experimentation.

"I love to go talk to partners and hear how they positioned it, and the mistakes they made,” he said.

He explained one of his favorite stories of a local Sydney partner.

“He didn’t know how to charge for it, so he just did time and materials, and I think he charged $10,000 and he was able to approve a reduction in operating expenses of $1 million for one of his best customers,” he ended.

This article originally appeared on CRN sister website CRN Australia.