Cloud marketplace creator Pax8 announced the findings of a new global survey of IT solution providers on marketplace trends and that Commvault is joining the Pax8 Marketplace during its Beyond EMEA: Berlin conference in October.
The Digital Sales Evolution in the Channel report, commissioned by Channelnomics, found that online marketplaces are essential growth engines to expand customer base, offer new and improved services, and enhance profitability at scale. Among the findings are that nine in 10 respondents globally are “experiencing significant benefits of marketplaces” and expect marketplace sales to rise by 2029.
Additionally, Commvault, a leading provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for hybrid cloud organizations, will bring enterprise data protection to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) by joining the Pax8 Marketplace.
Transformative power of marketplaces
There are opportunities for solution providers to tap their customer data analytics and scalability to unlock new and recurring revenue streams.
“As solution providers look to marketplaces as the sales channels of the future, they are best served by platforms with comprehensive e-commerce solutions that expand their digital capabilities, deliver a seamless online sales experience and maximize opportunities for upselling and cross-selling,” said Ryan Walsh, Chief Strategy Officer at Pax8. “The Pax8 Marketplace is designed to help partners unlock more sales opportunities and enhance relationships with their customers, providing them with the infrastructure and resources to drive profitability at scale.”
The channel report also found that more than one-third of solution providers globally generate more than 20 percent of their revenue through marketplaces and that 87 percent of respondents anticipate their use of marketplaces increasing over the next five years.
The report asserts that marketplaces offer solution providers the chance to expand their reach, enhance profitability at scale, and offer new and improved services to customers. Pax8 highlighted the potential that marketplaces could offer, including the following:
- The ability to reach a larger audience and demographics with minimal overhead, while driving sales volume and scalability simultaneously. The scalability of marketplaces enable solution providers to offer their product and services to a global market, unlocking new business opportunities, which respondents say could include: increase profitability (46 percent), increase demand for professional services (45 percent), and better customer data analytics (38 percent).
- Focus sales strategies on customer experience to sustain growth, specifically through prioritizing customer retention and satisfaction. Over half of the survey respondents (51 percent) said they are upgrading their sales technology and developing new partnerships, as well as 46 percent saying they are expanding their specialized services to provide a better customer experience.
- Evolving go-to-market strategies are shaped by customers buying preferences and behaviors. Three-quarters of global respondents to the survey acknowledge that customer feedback about marketplace purchases is influencing decision-making. The report found that 46 percent of solution providers in North America report that customer feedback influences their decision-making; 34 percent of providers in Europe and just 18 percent in Asia-Pacific share this sentiment.
Commvault joining the Pax8 Marketplace
More news from Pax8 comes in the form of Commvault joining the Pax8 Marketplace to bring enterprise-level solutions to MSPs.
One of the key solutions that Commvault brings to the marketplace is Commvault Cloud, a solution that unifies all of a company’s SaaS and software offerings on one platform and is built to meet the demands of hybrid cloud organizations at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
“The addition of Commvault underscores our continued commitment to bring enterprise-level solutions to our managed service providers to deliver to their small- to mid-sized business customers,” said Ryan Burton, Vice President of Marketplace Vendor Strategy at Pax8. “In addition to being the only vendor partner in Pax8’s Marketplace to backup Salesforce, Commvault Cloud can protect the broadest set of cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments and applications, including Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Entra ID, which provide the flexibility and configurability that our partners want in a data protection solution.”
Commvault Cloud combines cloud-based data security with rapid, enterprise-scale recovery and the industry’s most advanced AI to secure data wherever it lives. It unifies data protection and management in one single solution for a comprehensive set of workloads.
This provides SMB customers with various benefits such as complete control over where their data is stored, with the option to select a country that maps back to a Microsoft Azure or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region that allows for in-country data residency.
Commvault also offers unparalleled flexibility, which will allow customers to choose which data resides in primary or secondary storage tiers, optimizing cost and performance.
These announcements were made at Pax8’s inaugural Beyond EMEA: Berlin 2024, an expansion of its annual partner conference internationally. The event features core themes of community, education, and innovation with over 500 IT service providers, vendors, and media expected to attend.
There are numerous opportunities in the Pax8 Marketplace with a focus on helping partners realize the benefits of utilizing it. Take a look at how the Pax8 Marketplace drives growth and provides opportunities for channel partners.