Rob Rae at Pax8 Beyond 2024!

Lsten to the podcast HERE! 

Harry Brelsford  00:02

I'm with Rob Rae at Pax8 Beyond 2024 at the Gaylordin the Denver, Colorado area. So Rob, how you doing? Events take a lot of energy. How's it going?

Rob Rae  00:13

It's very good, and they do take a lot of energy. But ask me about my back tomorrow, and I'll let you know

Harry Brelsford  00:19

Yesterday in the press briefing, you had a slide had three pillars to correct me. Was it three pillars to an event or three pillars to the PAC state relationship?

Rob Rae  00:38

It's pretty much both. It's the three pillars were actually originally defined as to, why would you want to come to Pax8's event beyond but in essence, it's, it's really what we do for our entire community throughout the course of the year, and everything that we do, because those three pillars, community, education and innovation, are kind of critical for everything that we actually do For our partners? Well, walk me through them. Yeah, absolutely. So education piece. Obviously, we're all in this industry together and trying to learn how to be, not only better technologists, as far as the technology that we're actually leveraging, the vendors that we use in our stacks, but it's also running your business right? There's many, many more aspects to being an MSP than just picking the best backup solution. So if you think about it from that perspective, you know, all the vendors in this base are pretty good at giving out and talking about their own tech, not necessarily how it fits into the grand scheme of things. I think we have a distinct advantage of Pax8 from an education standpoint, because we kind of have all of the products. So we can focus on educating our partners, on being better business owners, being better technologists, and then choose your product here, kind of idea. So we've invested quite a bit into what's called the Pax8 Academy, which a lot of which are former MSPs themselves that have successfully exited their businesses. So they understand the needs of an MSP. They understand what the MSPs are looking for, what buttons we should be hitting on, and very successfully built, kind of a catalog of education for managed service providers, which in most cases free for our partners. The second pillar is innovation. And obviously, we're in the tech space. Everybody's looking for innovation, but in our space, specifically, and I don't want to use the D word, but in the old distribution world, there hasn't been a ton of innovation. I mean, the innovation comes from the vendors that are usually on these distributor blind cards. We have now started with with the promotion of Scott Jason from CTO to CEO. We now have a technical leader in charge here, and tech leaders want to develop tech, and so that's where we're making significant investments in our own marketplace, using AI industry best practices, everything that we know, in order to help the MSPs make better decisions, find better technologies and all the things that come along with being better Security and all that stuff, but proactively and again, using up to date technology to help partners grow. And then the community aspect, the third pillar. It just kind of ties all that together. We're all in the same, you know, airplane flying in the same direction. So leveraging that community, bringing everybody together, leveraging the brainpower of all of us, rather than individuals, can only advantage every everyone,

Harry Brelsford  03:22

Yeah, follow up. And I know it was presented this morning, but quickly, what? What are the numbers that it's a handsome audience, what are, what are some the numbers for Pax8? Beyond that what are you willing to share?

Rob Rae  03:35

Yeah, like attendees, yeah, yeah. So the goal this year was to get 1500 MSPs from around the world. So 17 different countries are represented here. We're actually oversold. We're at about 16 150 MSPs that have registered and checked in. And then we have a bunch of staff here, because we're based out of Denver, Colorado. So and then add in the vendors that we've got, so we have 110 vendors that are here. So if you add in all the employees from the vendor space, we're talking 25 2600 people total. Last year we had 992 MSPs join us. So we've had a 67% increase in the number of MSPs that went from last year to this year.

Harry Brelsford  04:15

Yeah. And then finally, and folks, by the way, I'm with Rob Rae, the corporate vice president of ecosystems and community. Appreciate your time, of course. So finally, I spoken around this morning, and you've announced the 2025 conference. Talk to me about that. Is that back here at the Gaylord,

Rob Rae  04:35

It is, Originally, we had signed, this is back in 2019 I believe maybe 18. We'd signed a three year contract with this hotel. It's a beautiful venue. Oh yeah, it's absolutely beautiful venue. So everybody seems to be enjoying it. They've just gone through some renos here as well. So we're taking advantage of the fact

Harry Brelsford  04:52

Yeah, yeah, same dates?

Rob Rae  05:02

Yeah. It's gonna be early June in 2025 and then we also announced that we are starting our EMEA shows, our European shows as well. So we'll be doing Berlin on October 24th and then we'll be doing another European event in 2025

Harry Brelsford  05:16

Yeah, that's smart. Well you travel more than travel more than anyone I know,

Rob Rae  05:23

I do more than likely, yes, yeah.

05:26

Thank you for your time, sir. Always a pleasure. Thank you and I very much appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Bye.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

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