As 2024 gains momentum, our guiding light is building out the innovative Pax8 Marketplace vision that we unveiled on stage at Beyond 2023. To that end, we’ve made several updates to our cloud marketplace, which I’ll detail below. But my team’s work is focused not only on creating the future of our Marketplace, but also the industry as a whole.
At Pax8, we are dedicated to fostering the success of our global partner community today and beyond. My appointment as Chief Product Officer of Pax8 demonstrates the importance of following our software development roadmap and investing in the technology ecosystem. This roadmap includes several recent technical advancements that improve the Pax8 experience for our partners, their customers, and our vendors.
Billing improvements
We’ve listened to our partners and have improved our billing system to give partners even more control and insight into how they procure, provision, and bill their clients.
Based on ongoing client feedback, we’ve enhanced the Microsoft NCE billing model to provide a more intuitive experience. In April, we will go live with Anniversary Billing. Anniversary Billing aligns the Pax8 billing period with the Microsoft NCE commitment term. Soon, when an annual subscription is purchased, the invoice will show a charge of exactly 12 months. We will also offer Microsoft Coterminosity to provide our customers with the means to align and manage their NCE subscription renewal dates.
We will support Adobe’s version of subscription alignment in May and continue to work to simplify Pax8 billing and invoicing. Later this year, we’ll roll out improved visualizations to help our partners understand how we arrive at a cost for a given order as well as a suite of detailed financial reports to augment new and improved invoices.
Additional features and functions
The team has also improved several other functions within our existing Marketplace, many at the request of our partners. Our mobile app soft-launched in the fall of 2023 and has now fully launched globally to let our partners manage their businesses from the palms of their hands.
In addition, we rolled out SMS communications in late 2023 to give partners another avenue for receiving important information and timely updates on the go. This Inbox feature delivers messaging directly to the platform our partners use the most. Partners can now set their preference for transactional messages and ensure they get the information they need in the most convenient place.
We streamlined our communications and brought the power of the Pax8 Marketplace to partners in new ways in 2023. In 2024, partners can expect to see us add even more communication channels, specifically Microsoft Teams, for our partners to select.
We have also enhanced the visual look and feel of our partners’ experience within the Marketplace. Additionally, our work in user experience (UX) research guides everything on our roadmap, and we have placed a focus on sharing that UX research within relevant teams at Pax8 to ensure our partners’ feedback is central to everything we do.
At Pax8, product and engineering work isn’t just a part of the organization. It’s an integral component of the work every team does across the organization, as we all work together to improve our existing technology and work toward our future state.
The future of technology is in the Marketplace
The future of our industry lies in connection and community, and our Pax8 Marketplace will be the connecting force that brings together vendors, partners, and customers in a seamless experience.
Our technology roadmap is replete with products, features, and data-driven insights that will fuel every user’s growth in our ecosystem. We are hard at work on building a secure platform that protects data and privacy while leveraging the power of that data to recommend solutions, provide valuable business insights to our MSP and vendor partners, and expertly match customers with partners.
The future of the channel and of technology adoption more broadly is found in using cloud marketplaces to grow business while reducing risk and increasing efficiency. Select partners are testing some of those new features now, and we will begin to deliver them deeper into the first half of 2024.
Pax8 never stops innovating, and there is nowhere that is truer than within our product and engineering teams. As our new Chief Product Officer, my pledge to the partner community is to team up with you to shape our technology strategy and to oversee its execution with the partner community always at the forefront. My focus on accelerating our transformation into a product-led technology company will, in turn, accelerate the growth of our partners and vendors.
