Pax8’s Eric Torres on MSP Marketplace Adoption & AI Success

Pax8 is on the path to marketplace success, bringing its global partners and their SMB customers along for the ride. While at NerdioCon 2025, Channel Insider caught up with Pax8’s VP of Channel and Community Engagement, Eric Torres, to learn more about how the company approaches AI, revenue growth, and more with its partners.

Marketplace features showing success nearly one year after announcement

Pax8 rolled out its cloud marketplace in two phases timed to its flagship and EMEA regional events in 2024. According to Torres, the two key features, Opportunity Explorer and Storefronts, are already showing tangible value to partners.

The marketplace offers Pax8 partners a new way to transact with the various vendors available through Pax8, including recent additions like Halycon, Sophos, and more. The features rolled out last year target next-generation experiences like self-service for customers to provision approved selections through their partners (the Storefronts) and automated insights into the next logical offering for clients based on existing orders (Opportunity Explorer).

Torres describes this as “bubbling up the gaps” for MSPs who want to increase their revenues and look to existing customers to do so. The marketplace essentially identifies cross-sell and upsell opportunities for MSPs while maintaining the daily billing and delivery tasks they need to support tech stacks.

“We’ve seen many partners already say to us, ‘we didn’t even realize we should be selling this until I logged in and the Marketplace told me,’ and that’s exactly what this is built to do,” Torres said.

According to a Pax8 spokesperson, MSPs utilizing Storefronts have increased their self-service revenue per customer by over 35 percent.

“MSPs are adopting Storefronts because of the changes in how people are consuming goods overall,” Torres said. “We are in front of all of that, and there isn’t anyone else doing quite what we’re doing from a procurement standpoint of software and licensing.”

Voyager Alliance formalizes MSP experience

In November, Pax8 announced its first formalized partner program, the Voyager Alliance, which incentivizes partner growth through various offerings at five tiers dependent on a partner’s monthly spend.

“MSPs are used to programs like this; every vendor has some form of differentiating partners. The program is in its infancy, and it’s only going to grow from here,” Torres said. “It’s almost like a challenge we’re giving to partners, to encourage them to reach the next level of growth and get to the next tier.”

The program’s tiers include access to professional services at different rates, plus partner enablement resources through the Pax8 Academy and more.

Voyager Alliance will also include Pax8 Premier, a new offering through which Pax8 works with its partners to secure marketing agreements between MSPs and local sports organizations.

AI is the next frontier for Pax8 and its CEO

It is nearly impossible to broadly discuss anything in the channel and tech without asking how AI factors into plans. At Pax8, various forms of AI are already in use, with more to follow. Torres says this is partly due to how Scott Chasin, the company’s CEO as of May 2024, views the technology as the next frontier of technological innovation.

“For us, having Scott Chasin as our now CEO, having a technical mind as the captain of our ship, it makes it a bit easier. He’s all in, and a lot of the features we’re adding is with that AI focus,” Torres said.

Torres didn’t share many specifics about how the company has adopted AI internally. Still, marketplace features like Opportunity Explorer leverage AI-based models to serve suggestions and insights to partners looking to add revenue.

The company has piloted “master class” workshops in EMEA focused on AI and data topics. According to Torres, the workshops went so well that the resource will be available for North American partners this year.

He also mentioned that Pax8’s overall message to MSPs who are still uncertain about AI is to start with small, specific use cases in order to achieve an initial ROI before moving on to larger adoption.

“For the entire MSP community, it can take a little while for the whole community to adopt something new overall,” Torres said. “There’s those that jump into it right away, with anything new, as we saw with cloud and other new technologies. Others, though, they’re a little hesitant, and it takes a nudge to get them comfortable.”

This advice mirrors what many executives told us at NerdioCon last week about the long road toward AI implementation. 

“Just running through the numbers, 35% of growth for MSPs will happen on the AI front in 2025, and that’s forcing partners to ask how they can tap into this,” Torres said, citing Lansweeper’s recent report. “We’re seeing 25% growth in the operational efficiencies from using AI, and there’s a direct correlation to revenue. There’s about a 19% revenue jump for partners who are operating manual tasks.”

Beyond the tech: how events and community also fuel growth

Torres joined Pax8 in late 2024 to lead partner-focused enablement, events, and other resources. That community is part of why events like NerdioCon are important to him and his team, and it’s also why Pax8 pours so much into its own conference.

“Nerdio is a strategic partner of ours, and we want to support them like they are supporting us,” Torres said. “If you look at this year’s event compared to last year, it feels like it’s doubled in size.”

Beyond that, Pax8’s flagship event in Denver will return this June. The company is also hosting its Beyond EMEA event in Amsterdam in October of this year.

“There’s certainly a lot of buzz around Beyond, and you can just feel it,” Torres said. “It’s quickly becoming the must-attend event, that we are building something very strong where people are excited and you feel momentum growing behind it.”

Looking forward, Torres says the company will continue to support its partner base through constant innovation and shifting channel business models.

Catch up on the newest tech features Nerdio rolled out at its annual conference, including the latest version of Nerdio Manager for MSP.