AI isn’t coming — it’s already here, and the only question is whether you’re ready to meet it.NH

‘We believe that inevitably, AI is going to change all of our worlds … The most important part about this is being ready for it. There’s a lot of MSPs that are not talking to their end users about AI, and that scares me, and it’s mostly because a lot of MSPs don’t know how to have the conversation about AI,’ says Rob Rae, corporate vice president of community and ecosystems at Pax8.

Ever-evolving and increasingly complex IT landscapes must include the right mix of cloud, data management, automation, and AI. It’s something that vendors can help arm their partners with, as well as the knowledge of how all the pieces can work together to create a solution that promotes greater productivity and efficiency.

At The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed 2025 event in Atlanta, Tom Colleary, president of solution provider F3 Technology Partners, led the conversation with executives from Pax8, Commvault, and Concierto on leveraging AI to aid digital transformations. Each company shared their own transformation journey and how AI fits into their portfolio and businesses processes, and the vendors spoke about the importance of cloud marketplaces, data protection strategies, and new platforms are driving growth, streamlining operations, and creating new value for clients.

The executives encouraged MSPs to adapt and leverage AI to enhance efficiency and security even if they aren’t ready to start the conversation with end customers.

Here are excerpts from the panel at XChange Best of Breed 2025.

How have your companies evolved to meet the changing needs of your partners?

Ciji Joseph, global partner head, Concierto

A little bit back into [our] history, say late 2018, we used to be a business consulting firm, and what we did is we launched major research and what we understood as part of that is that the window for digital transformation, that’s shrinking, and the need for digitally qualified resources, that’s increasing. Compounding this, we all know what happened in 2019, so this opportunity, the need to do digital transformation, that has accelerated. We didn’t want to be branded as business consulting or IT service provider. We wanted to have our own differentiators. That has actually led to the thought of moving away from these services to a property-based, digital platform business that resulted in the evolution of Concierto.

Mario Pirolozzi, vice president of MSPs, Commvault

Going back in the history of Commvault, we started out as data backup organization. It was very simple and we obviously transitioned away from, because there’s 1,000 backup vendors out there. It’s not good enough just to have your data. But how do you know it’s safe? How is it usable? That level of in-depth knowledge and usability is super important for us as well. And going back to kind of the legacy of Commvault, we were very driven on on-prem infrastructure, software, perpetual licensing. In the last few years, we’ve kind of made a massive transition over to the SaaS platform. It’s going on five years now, and that product itself [Commvault] Metallic AI, went from zero to 200 million in under three years. We saw the market shift and what that meant for our business was transformative. We went from a siloed solution, to Metallic, to coupling to our existing base of infrastructure and private cloud, and bundled that together and now, in the past 18 months, we are Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI, so folding it all into the mix and really leveraging, wherever the big resides, where it’s being created, how do we protect it? How do we make sure it’s secure? How do we use that zero trust framework? And how does that all make sense for both the enterprise, the federal government, the fortune 500 all the way down to the mom-and-pop shops.

Rob Rae, corporate vice president, community and ecosystems, Pax8

We like to disrupt at Pax8. Unfortunately, we live in an industry that has a tendency to get lazy. We live in an industry that’s supposed to be innovating moving forward, but we get comfortable in where we are. We like to push on that. One of the things that we did just more recently was [develop] a marketplace. The buyer journey is changing the way in which users consume things from you. They don’t want to talk to you. They want to self-service. They want to do their own research. They hate talking to people, especially sales people. Nobody enjoys doing it anymore, but that was the only way that you could buy and now, you also need to do the same thing for your end users. Your end users need a way in which they feel like they’re self-serving. And there’s a couple reasons for that. The pandemic, of course, where it was all about platforms and services where we could go and buy and consume things and make judgments on things that we have no idea what we’re doing and making sure we’re getting the best deal. All those platforms developed really, really well over the pandemic, to the point that post pandemic, we haven’t gone back to the way in which we consume things. Your SMB end users are no different. According to some recent data, it’s saying that your end users are shopping around your products, your services [and] things that they can consume through you two months prior to actually talking to you about it. That’s scary. The journey has changed, which means us and our part in the ecosystem has changed. So, we’ve been moving away from being a classic distributor and more into a marketplace, going to where the ball is going. And that also includes the next generation, the Gen Zers that are coming up.

Where are your companies in their AI journeys?

Pirolozzi: AI is embedded in everything we do, going from the product, to the process, to the documentation. I look at AI for our partners as something that the immediate impact is efficiency, it’s scale, it’s automation, it’s the things that impact the day to day, not the big picture of: “Hey, it’s going to take our jobs.” That’s probably coming down the pipeline, but for the immediate impact today, concerning how an entity runs their business, we had a technical advisory board last month, and the biggest takeaway was: I want to be more automated. I want more processes documented, but I don’t have the people, I don’t have the processes, I don’t have the infrastructure to do that. How do I become more efficient? How do I do more with less?” And so everything that we do, not only in protecting the workloads of AI, whether it’s a data lake or whether you talk about Databricks or Snowflake or any of those others, where it’s all hosted, also, in practice, all the workloads that we’re supporting as a data protection organization, how are we leveraging AI to maximize that output? How are we securing those workloads? How do we give the proactiveness to our partners to then be intelligent and be able to deliver a better solution to the customer? So, it’s all about the partners. It’s all about enabling and leveraging them and giving them tools to control it, have it in a consolidated viewpoint on that control plane, and make sure I’m going to where the ball is going.

Joseph: In our case, we don’t treat a group of automations as the definition of AI. [As a] good example of AIOps, the objective, and we are not there yet, but the target that we are getting on these digital platforms, it’s what we call a self-optimized infrastructure. An infrastructure that understands the factors, that understands the usage, that scales up [and] scales down based the demand, does the automated patching [by] tapping into multitude of tools. [It’s a] platform self understands the behavior. That’s on the platform side. And of course, none of this is possible without our agentic AI inside the solution where we have good data. None of this is possible without the quality of the data [and] initiating the continuous learning. And of course, beyond that platform, we do have a partner ecosystem where we are supporting 75 plus partners worldwide and within this partner ecosystem as well, the processes that we do, we talked about tech support as an example. Instead of humans being staffed on a 24/7 basis, which all of us understand, it’s not the most cost-effective model. How it can be driven by engineering AI, so those are some of the examples of how we are adding value.

Rae: We believe that inevitably, AI is going to change all of our worlds. And I don’t think anybody can argue that it’s going to change the business and the world. The most important part about this is being ready for it. There’s a lot of MSPs that are not talking to their end users about AI, and that scares me, and it’s mostly because a lot of MSPs don’t know how to have the conversation about AI. They don’t want to open the door that they cannot close or fulfill or sell something. And it’s because we have to get out of the traditional mindset of the way in which we’ve been selling things. We do believe that the way in which we sell, the way in which we make money, the way in which we commoditize this market, the way in which we discover our opportunities, it’s all going to change. Think about even just all the different transformations we’ve had, where we went from recurring revenue and managed services, that was a 5-6-7-year journey for us to figure that out. When we moved from on-prem to cloud, again, another 5-6-7- year journey. AI is different and game-changing. And I look at AI from an SMB business perspective, it’s just as relevant as it is in the enterprise space. The SMB total addressable market is $777 billion that is more than enterprise, and all of a sudden, there are more SMB opportunities in it than there is in enterprise. We have to be ready for it. We have to be prepared for it. We’re working on, A) Finding these technologies, B) Be helping them find the MSP space, understand the MSP space. Build a partner program. Find margin for you. C) Understand why it’s important that you need to do this through a managed service provider.

How do you want your partners to engage with you on AI?

Pirolozzi: I really think it depends on maturity and partner when it comes to AI. I had a conversation last week with one of our partners, and they don’t claim to be the experts. They don’t say: “Hey, we know everything that needs to be known. You need to follow our direction.” They’re going to their customers and saying: “What do you want to know? What’s important to your business? How can we help leverage that?” And they’re going to do their due diligence and their homework and saying: “OK, this is what we have to offer. How Commvault specifically can support that.” Again, going back to the number of workloads that we protect, the infrastructure, the machine learning, the AI — the program you run is great, but all the infrastructure that runs that program matters and so what Commvault is able to do is achieve at the very base level, server protection on what all of these programs are running on, and then actually supporting that that AI function. What I would want to take away is: “Hey, have a conversation with us. Tell us what you’re seeing. We’ll show you how you can support it.”

Rae: A couple things that Pax8 is doing right now. We’re building an AI store. We’re going to start introducing technologies into this space that you’ve never heard of that are going to help you find opportunities. Revenue generation – it’s that simple. Where we have 47,000 MSPs around the world. We’re leveraging the ones that are a little more advanced to find out what it is that they’re doing, what technologies they’re using, how are they approaching it? How are they documenting all this stuff? How are they customizing all this stuff? And then we’re sharing it with the entire community, because we all believe that this is a massive opportunity to do that. So, we’re leveraging the power of our base to be able to bring all that technology, innovation and education to you, to your teams, to your sales, to your go-to-market strategy and helping you make that transformation. One real key to this is if you’re not talking to your end users, if it’s not part of everything that you’re doing, you absolutely need to make it part of what you’re doing today. Make sure that your end users, when they hit that conference, talk to that neighbor, talk to a coworker, friend, read an article, that you are the first person that pops into their mind. You have to. Even if you’re not ready for the conversation, tell them that. “I’m here. I’m working on it. I’m getting educated. My team’s getting educated. We’re going to be on the forefront of this. Call me when you’re ready.” The education part of that is what we’re working on. And we’ve got a couple of great programs that will help benchmark you, measure you, tell you where you’re on your journey. We’ve got a service already built into our into our marketplace, so you can query your own data, you can have better information, better relationships [and] more upsell opportunities. All that stuff is built into the tech. And on top of that, we want to go on a journey with you.