Pax8’s Rob Rae: MSPs Are Helping To Drive Marketplace Road Map

‘Partner feedback is always critical,’ says Rob Rae, senior vice president of community and partner experience at Pax8. ‘Some of the ideas they’ve brought us have actually led us to redesign certain parts of our road map.’

More than a year after its initial debut, Pax8’s marketplace is gaining real traction with MSPs, and the company is homing in on platform strategy, partner feedback and AI-driven development to capitalize on the momentum.

Pax8’s marketplace has seen “very, very, very responsive” adoption from partners over the past year, according to Rob Rae, senior vice president of community and partner experience at the Denver-based cloud marketplace. But while adoption has grown steadily, the focus now is on getting partners to leverage more of what the platform can actually do.

“A lot of them have migrated toward the marketplace, but they’re not necessarily leveraging all the different aspects,” Rae told CRN. “We’re talking [to MSPs] about showing best practices, where to click, what to turn on … because once they see it, it really clicks.”

And feedback from partners over the past year has directly shaped the platform’s evolution, including features added in its June 2025 refresh.

[Related: Pax8 Exec: AI-Guided Growth Program Helps MSPs ‘Grow In The Way That Matters Most To Them’]

“Partner feedback is always critical,” Rae said. “Some of the ideas they’ve brought us have actually led us to redesign certain parts of our road map.”

And that road map is anchored in a broader industry shift: the rise of the platform model.

“Creating a place that makes it easy for MSPs to transact, and for their customers to transact through them, just makes sense,” he said. “Younger generations want to do their own research, explore options. They don’t want to wait on a sales call. That’s what the platform enables.”

Pax8 sees this shift as a global trend, he added. And while many vendors and distributors are developing platforms, Rae said that Pax8 has a unique advantage: “This is what we do best. This is the only thing we do. And it makes sense to build partnerships around that.”

While Pax8 didn’t share hard numbers, Rae said there was a “noticeable uptick” in both partner adoption and end-user engagement.

“We’ve grown from around 35,000 to 42,000 partners, and new partners are on-boarding directly into the marketplace experience,” he said. “They're not engaging with us the old way, and that’s made their ramp-up so much easier.”

The company is also putting a sharper focus on the partner experience, including programs like professional services, partner rewards and guided growth. All of those aspects, according to Rae, are being tightly integrated into the marketplace so partners have a centralized view of their entire Pax8 relationship.

“Our goal is to build everything into the marketplace, not just tools, but all the programs we offer to help partners grow their business,” he said.

And a few weeks ahead of the Pax8 Beyond EMEA event in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Rae revealed that Pax8 is launching a training track for MSPs on how to build AI agents, a first for the company.

“If this is successful, we’ll package it up and take it global,” he said. “We believe MSPs will be a critical part of building AI-driven solutions for end users. This is step one: teaching them how to actually build an agent.”