John Walters comes into the newly created position of VP of Service Operations, to ensure that Pax8’s support of partners does not flag as their business grows, particularly in the critical onboarding stage.
Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions at Pax8
Denver-based cloud distributor Pax8 has built up significant momentum over the last year, adding a significant number of new partners as they grow their business. In order to ensure that the growing company is able to maintain quality of service, particularly as new partners are onboarded, a new VP has recently been added. Pax8 is also adding new employees called Cadets, whose job is to recruit new partners, freeing up the existing Cloud Service Advisors to focus on providing service to partners. Finally, Pax8 has added a company-wide project management tool, which is internal and doesn’t directly touch partners, but indirectly should maintain service by allowing staff to efficiently manage the growing business.
“We think the message around what we are about is really resonating in the market,” said Ryan Walsh, senior vice president of Partner Solutions at Pax8. “We have over 80 people now, and we will be 120 by the end of the year. As we grow, we have to update our processes and capabilities. We don’t want things to slow down because speed and focus is what we are about. That means bringing in new people.”
The new VP, John Walters, has been named to the newly formed position of vice president of Service Operations, and will be responsible for the strategic direction of the company’s service delivery and technical support. He was previously a a senior director for Wipro, a large global IT consultancy, and managed multiple teams providing data centre transition and IT support services within the public sector. He earlier held various management positions supporting global teams for Level 3 Communications, AT&T, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Avaya.
“John Walters is a very experienced senior level guy,” Walsh said. “Our support team needs to grow with the number of partners we have been adding. He has managed service delivery teams with large organizations, and ones with lots and lots of partners. We are spending a lot of time not just making sure a partner is active, but making sure that their coming on board is a good experience, and that everything matches what we said. You can’t afford for people to sign up and have a bad experience. We are hypersensitive about keeping that from happening. That’s why John’s role was created.
“We didn’t create this role because we had service issues, but because we want partners coming in to not fall through the cracks,” Walsh added. “When we were a smaller company, individual talent can make things happen. But as you grow, you need to make things repeatable and streamline operations. Even though we are bringing in more partners, we want to make sure no one gets left behind.”
The same philosophy underlies another new initiative, the creation of new junior roles in the marketing organization, termed Cadets, who are focused on partner recruitment.
“This is another attempt to stay nimble,” Walsh said. “We are putting these Cadets in the marketing group to recruit partners. It will allow our Cloud Service Advisors to focus on growing our partners, working with partners who have already signed. In the past they did both, recruit and work with existing partners. We need to give our full attention to partners we have signed.”
Pax8 has also implemented a company-wide project management tool, which will make departments able to interact more systematically. While it’s an internal process that partners won’t see directly, Walsh said that they will see its impact.
“Partners do care that as we grow, we are looking for ways to make sure we don’t drop our service levels to them,” he said. “This allows us to stay coordinated and connected, and keep those service levels high.”
