Pax8: Microsoft Dynamics Offers MSPs More Revenue, Competitive Edge

‘The market penetration from the managed services space is really low. Only 2 percent of Microsoft 365 users are actually using Dynamics, so there’s massive opportunity there,’ Pax8’s Rob Rae tells an audience of MSPs at XChange March 2023.

Rob Rae, corporate vice president of communities and ecosystems for Pax8

Pax8’s recent acquisition of Bam Boom Cloud takes the complexity out of Microsoft Dynamics, allows MSPs to tap into additional revenue streams and gives them a leg up over their competition.

“There’s actual opportunity here because the numbers that are flushing out are really, really good,” said Rob Rae, corporate vice president of communities and ecosystems for Denver-based Pax8. “The market penetration from the managed services space is really low. Only 2 percent of Microsoft 365 users are actually using Dynamics, so there’s massive opportunity there.”

Rae and Vicky Critchley, founder and CEO of Bam Boom Cloud and now the corporate vice president of business applications for cloud-first distributor Pax8, spoke to about 300 MSPs at CRN parent company The Channel Company’s XChange March 2023 in Orlando, Fla., this week.

[Related: Pax8 Execs: Partners Must Double Down On Enablement]

Rae said Bam Boom Cloud is the easy button for Microsoft Dynamics and that MSPs are seeing 50 percent year-over-year growth once they started using it. They also are seeing an 84 percent increase in revenue once they started selling it.

But the reason many MSPs don’t use Dynamics is because it’s massively complex, he said.

“Microsoft hasn’t made it easy,” he said. “This has been a big, hairy enterprise tool for a very, very long time. But they want to get their share into the MSP market.”

MSPs should be looking to use and offer Microsoft Dynamics for additional revenue streams, a competitive edge and customer retention.

“You have the opportunity to go in there and be the expert and improve customer retention,” he said.

Rae also said security is a hot-button topic, and there is nobody better in this world to service SMB customers than MSPs.

“So the opportunity to continue to go upmarket and leverage those services and the knowledge and education you have is big,” he said.

Critchley said Bam Boom Cloud is laser-focused on SMBs.

“Small businesses that you serve don’t like expensive projects,” Critchley told the MSPs in the audience. “They don’t like things that go on for a while, and they don’t like things that go wrong. So therefore, you guys ignore it. We’ve been developing fixed-priced and fixed-scope implementations for Dynamics at scale.”

And Dynamics is completely tailored to an MSP’s business. When an MSP purchases Dynamics through Pax8, the MSP keeps all of the licenses, which helps with the accreditations at Microsoft and delivers margin on services and support, she said.

The majority of data is moved to Dynamics from Microsoft Azure, so almost everything is already in the Microsoft cloud.

Anything that’s left on a server generally then comes over to Azure so that it can have the same benefits of everything in the cloud, “so there's a huge uplift of Azure consumption,” she said.

“You put a little bit of this into a SMB, show them the power of the platform, and they will be back for more,” she added.

Mike Hurd, director of technology services of Lenexa, Kan.-based MSP Wachter, told CRN that he likes when a company repackages things into reusable nuggets.

“When I can reconfigure into a total solution and business outcome for my clients that meets their needs,but without the complexity of trying to start from ground zero, that’s very exciting to me,” he said. “We use some of these products ourselves to run our own business, and we know how complicated they are. So knowing I can actually wrap my head around selling this to an end user is very exciting.”