Who’s In on Pax8’s Agent Store?
Thirty named launch partners so far, most of which are taking it on faith that their vision for agentic AI in managed services will continue to mesh with Pax8’s.
Someday, perhaps, Nanites agents will be listed on the agentic AI marketplace Pax8 told the world it was building during its Beyond conference last spring. If they are, it seems, they’ll be in good company. Among the Agent Store launch partners Pax8 announced last October are industry giants like Microsoft and AWS, MSP mainstays like ConnectWise and Rewst, and agentic AI trailblazers like Pia and (recent ConnectWise acquisition) zofiQ.
Do the 30 companies on that list all have detailed roadmaps for what they’ll sell in the marketplace when it opens for business and concrete plans for weaving those agents into larger go-to-market strategies? Not so far as I can tell from recent conversations with three of them. What they do have, however, are six deeply held beliefs:
1. Agents will soon play a part in the vast majority of solutions sold and supported by MSPs.
“That’s our vision, and that’s where we see the market going,” says Gaidar Magdanurov (pictured), president of security vendor Acronis. “Agents will be everywhere in all products.”
2. Pax8 is all-in on the future importance of agents in managed services.
“What [Pax8 CEO Scott Chasin] said at Pax8 Beyond last year about the managed intelligence provider is exactly what we believe as well,” explains James Farrow, co-founder and CEO of Cyft, one of the many AI-native startups for MSPs you’ve read about here on Channelholic in recent months. “It’s just perfect alignment philosophically in how we see the future.”
3. MSPs will eventually transact as routinely on agent marketplaces as they already do on SaaS marketplaces.
“From a first-principles perspective, they exist for the same reason,” Farrow says. “There are so many options out there, and we need them aggregated to make discovery easier.” If anything, he continues, MSPs will probably value agent marketplaces even more than they do SaaS ones.
“AI is harder to evaluate for ROI and value,” Farrow observes. “You need trust that the marketplace has vetted vendors and that they’re not vaporware.”
4. A whole lot of MSPs buy software from Pax8.
Over 47,000 of them, to be precise, according to Pax8 itself. “Pax8 is a huge player,” says Amanda Adams, vice president of Americas Alliances at CrowdStrike. “They own that market when it comes to how they service their clients.”
5. Pax8 is, as far as we know right now, pretty much the only MSP-focused SaaS marketplace operator developing an agent store.
The store it’s building, moreover, will do more than sell agents. It will orchestrate the work those agents do as well.
“Over time, agents will talk to each other,” Magdanurov says. “You’ll mix and match tools into workflows—SentinelOne detects something, Acronis responds, another system reports it.”
MSPs will design these end-to-end workflows, he continues, using Pax8’s marketplace as a sort of centralized point of coordination. Those workflows, in turn, will become the foundation for process-optimizing, productivity-boosting end user solutions, Adams adds.
“Instead of just a marketplace listing and buying products, what the Pax Agent Store is truly doing is delivering outcomes,” she says.
6. Based on the logic of beliefs 1-5, launch partners have concluded, listing on Pax8’s forthcoming agent marketplace makes sense even if many of the specifics are still coming into focus.
“We need to be everywhere customers are,” Magdanurov says. Adams agrees.
“There is only an upside,” she says.
As long as we’re talking about Cyft and Acronis…
…I might as well fill you in on a little news from both of them, starting with Cyft.
When you last heard from the company six months ago, it was completing work on the first of what will in time be at least three AI-native automation solutions for MSPs. Called Sam (as in “service activity memory”), the system is an automated, AI-powered documentation tool that quietly listens to help desk calls and uses what it hears to update tickets, generate detailed documentation, and draft client-ready resolution reports.
Cyft officially launched the product, which sells for $149 per technician per month on annual contracts, last December. At present it integrates solely with ConnectWise PSA, but three more unspecified PSA integrations are due this year.
Longer term, Cyft has ambitions not unlike those you read about here recently in relation to another young startup named Lexful. Both companies plan to use automated documentation as the starting point for collecting data capable of doing far more strategic work for MSPs across their tool stack.
“MSPs rely on human-generated data today, which is inconsistent,” Farrow (pictured) says. “We provide consistent, machine-generated intelligence that can power many downstream outcomes.”
As for Acronis, it’s currently working on two new agentic security solutions. The first, called Acronis Cyber Workspace, is a self-help security chatbot that MSPs can offer their clients. The second, called Acronis Cyber Studio, will let MSPs create and run integrated agentic help desk workflows.
“People used to operate multiple tools, go to different places, click multiple buttons,” Magdanurov says. “Our goal now is to streamline this so you have one workflow.”
That will typically begin with a technician receiving automated word of an incident and issuing remediation instructions via natural language chat. “Then the agentic workflow kicks in and executes all the proper steps, coming back to technicians only if something needs approval, or fully resolving it automatically,” Magdanurov explains.
Both products are due by the end of the year.
Who better to ask about Google’s new partner program than the guy who built it?
Though it’s the only big three hyperscaler not among Pax8’s Agent Store launch partners, Google has plenty brewing in AI, and a brand new partner program designed to help MSPs and others get in on it all. Phil Larson, managing director of partner programs for Google Cloud, discusses that and more on the latest episode of MSP Chat, the weekly podcast I co-host. Check that episode out here and others featuring some of the MSP world’s top thought leaders here.
