The acquisition of Wirehive at the start of the year has set up Pax8’s formal entry into the UK market, its leadership team has told UC Today.
The launch of Pax8 UK, along with a strategic leadership team for the country that names former Wirehive boss, Robert Belgrave, as Chief Executive Officer and Phylip Morgan as channel chief, follows the acquisition of Wirehive and a $96m funding round.
The acquisition of Wirehive, a cloud consultancy firm, has given Pax8 a headquarters to operate from in Farnborough and Bristol, with Pax8 UK committing to grow its employee base from 35 to over 100 by the end of the year.
Belgrave said that the Cloud infrastructure provider has been trying to break into the UK market for 18 months.
“In the US, Pax8 has gone from a standing start to being the dominant CSP player in the North American subsidiary, which is quite an accolade in terms of revenue.
“But there isn’t anyone like Pax8 in the UK market at the moment, so we saw there was this opportunity to bring the two together to help Pax8 kickstart their UK ambitions.
“For Wirehive, we wanted to become part of something much bigger and venture funded, because to this point we have been organically funded, and bolt our consulting capability onto what is already a successful modern cloud distribution practice and address, not just the UK, but the global market.”
Focus
Nick Heddy, Chief Revenue Officer at Pax8, said that Pax8 is focused on growing their Cloud ecosystem into new markets, hinting that the round of funding will be used for further acquisitions to grow its market reach.
Wirehive partners in Europe can now access the Pax8 Platform and purchase products from Microsoft, Bitdefender and SentinelOne amongst others, with the focus for Pax8 still firmly on channel partners.
“I would say, 99 per cent of our business is managed service providers and 100 per cent of it is channel,” said Heddy. “We’ve tried to build our platform in a flexible way that works with any go to market strategy or any model so partners can take advantage of our technology.
“The shift to the cloud is in its infancy, even though it’s got a lot of coverage Microsoft regularly release stats that say Cloud penetration is still in the 20 to 30 percent range in the small to midsize business markets”
“Ultimately, we are always focused on empowering the modern channel. And so, that means that we’re going to be focused on, enabling our partners at a rate faster than others, we will be focused on technologies that we could add to our platform that give our partner ecosystem a unique advantage, as well as getting into markets where we are not today.”
