7 takeaways from Pax8 Beyond EMEA 2026

Around 1,700 attendees, including 1,100 MSPs from around the world, descended on Pax8’s Beyond EMEA in Copenhagen. But as the IT services industry undergoes rapid change, why is this event about much more than simply bringing partners together?

1. MSPs don't want to fall behind on AI

Most of the roughly 1,100 MSP attendees at Beyond 2026 in Copenhagen came from Europe, including many from the UK and the Netherlands, as well as around 110 from Germany and the wider DACH region.

But there were also around 100 MSPs from the US and Canada and roughly 50 from the Asia-Pacific region.

Why? After all, Pax8 Beyond will make its debut in Sydney from 14 to 16 March 2027, while the flagship Beyond takes place next summer, from 6 to 8 June 2027, in Chula Vista near San Diego.

It has something to do with the speed of AI development and the fact that some partners want to stay ahead of the curve, travelling to every Beyond event regardless of where in the world they can connect with Pax8 and the MSP community.

Everyone who attended in Copenhagen received early-bird access to Pax8’s 8os and 8bot during the event, with their accounts also credited with $1,000.

“A lot can happen in a few months,” Pax8 EMEA boss Harald Nuij tells CRN.

Some partners simply do not want to risk falling behind on their “AI journey”. That fits perfectly with the message from Libby McIlhany, Pax8’s head of product development, urging partners to get started with 8os and 8bot: “Stop talking, let’s get building.”

2. ‘Aha moment’ after conversations with MSPs

Pax8 decided at the beginning of this year to develop its own AI operating system after failing to find a solution on the market that brought together all the tools needed for the “agentic workforce” in one platform that could be managed easily and used to quickly create and deploy bots, McIlhany tells CRN.

Listening to the needs of MSPs is “extremely important” to Pax8, she says. The company does not want to develop products without its MSPs in mind, and certainly does not want to acquire software from a company if it is not right for this particular audience.

“We didn’t see another solution in the market that brings together tokens, agents, budgets and cost management, as well as governance and control.”

McIlhany says that across many conversations with MSPs she experienced an “aha moment” that led to the decision to develop 8os in-house.

According to McIlhany, another decision followed in the summer: to develop 8bot, software for agentic working.

Through Pax8’s MCP servers, MSPs can connect data from their systems to 8os, providing what McIlhany describes as an “enormous API acceleration”.

Pricing for 8bot has not yet been determined.

“We will decide on the pricing model later. First, we want to see partners’ experiences and incorporate their feedback,” McIlhany says.

3. What comes next for Pax8 partners?

Beyond customers in Copenhagen have early-bird status and can start using 8os and 8bot immediately.

Other partners will have to wait for general availability, which McIlhany says is expected at the beginning of 2027. Until then, further feedback will feed into the development of the AI technology.

Platforms are never really finished. They are innovated “on the fly”.

A potentially significant next step would be for third-party solutions to be offered alongside Pax8’s 8bot.

Could partners, for example, integrate and manage their own agents within the AI platform, including those they have developed for specific customer processes?

“Yes, that is planned,” McIlhany says.

And there is more: Pax8 will enable partners to put their own agentic solutions onto its platform. That means 8os will also become a sales channel for partners’ solutions.

4. Is Pax8 a competitor to vendors?

The development of 8os and 8bot raises another question: is Pax8 becoming a software vendor and, if so, does that put it into competition with the vendors whose products it already carries?

“To some extent, we will become a software provider,” McIlhany says.

“But I would say that 8os and 8bot complement our vendors’ solutions. We don’t see any conflicts.”

So, no competition, particularly with Microsoft, the largest vendor in the Pax8 portfolio and one that presumably accounts for the biggest share of Pax8’s revenue.

5. Revenue growth and expansion plans

EMEA boss Harald Nuij will not reveal exactly how large that contribution is, but says Microsoft is a “highly strategic partner” for Pax8.

Microsoft was one of four Titanium sponsors of Beyond in Copenhagen, alongside CrowdStrike, Hornetsecurity and SentinelOne. There were also around 50 other sponsors at precious-metal tiers represented with stands, alongside other vendors helping to fund the multimillion-euro conference.

In 2024, Nuij confirmed to CRN revenue of around $2bn for the company, which has approximately 1,900 employees.

The update: the company has grown at a double-digit rate to $2.5bn in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

“We are gaining market share,” Nuij says.

Germany has recently delivered “very strong growth”, while business in the UK is performing “excellently”.

Nuij sees no signs of market saturation. Quite the opposite.

“It just keeps going up,” he says.

He is very satisfied with the work of the DACH team led by Thorsten Oevel. Growth has been even stronger in Switzerland, largely because distributor Alltron lost its Microsoft CSP status and Pax8 took over that business.

Pax8 plans to expand into further countries next year, as well as increasing its teams in markets including Austria and Spain. A colleague is already exploring the Italian market.

“We are focusing our expansion more heavily on southern European countries in 2027,” Nuij says.

Pax8 also grows with every new vendor it adds to its portfolio.

One of the latest additions, announced at Beyond in Copenhagen, is a partnership with Google covering Workspace and Chrome Enterprise. The press release is still being prepared.

6. ‘They call us a distributor. They were wrong’

Like no other distributor… Sorry, CRN almost used the forbidden word.

Pax8 does not want to be categorised that way and certainly does not want to be lumped in with the “old distributors”.

“They call us a distributor. They were wrong,” read the striking New York Times advertisement that caused a stir in the channel in March 2024.

“They” was aimed at the broadline distributors, which Pax8 CEO Scott Chasin accused of selling “old wine in new bottles”, with Pax8 spending considerable money on its attack on the world’s two largest distributors.

CRN is familiar with attempts like this to redefine companies. They have happened repeatedly during periods of technological upheaval.

But neither newspaper advertising, declarations nor other attempts at verbal reframing turn a company into something other than what it is: a supplier of software and services to the channel.

Of course, systems integrators and MSPs can buy licences through Pax8, sometimes even “more expensively than from the competition”, according to one MSP speaking to CRN.

So why did he nevertheless switch to Pax8, particularly when his company is based in Westphalia, where one very large distributor and Microsoft CSP partner might immediately spring to mind?

7. Community building: the network around Pax8

“We didn’t just want a supplier, but a partner that would help us develop our business model further,” Markus Gratopp, owner of Gratopp.it, tells CRN.

He says his company, which currently employs around 40 people, has developed into a “Managed Intelligence Provider” (MIP).

Later, he appeared on stage at Beyond in Copenhagen with Harald Nuij to discuss the company’s transformation.

Pax8 is riding this wave and many smaller providers are following because they are finding it difficult to deploy AI solutions and sell them to their customers as a service. But they do not want to miss out on what has often been described as the once-in-a-century opportunity presented by AI.

Pax8 has a cloud marketplace and now also has a platform for deploying and managing AI solutions.

It has no end-customer business, and there are no plans to allow IT service providers and MSPs to bring their customers to Beyond.

At an MSP’s request, Pax8 partner managers will join customer discussions, but their involvement goes no further than that.

Pax8 offers “comprehensive enablement” and “direct support” to partners and facilitates “valuable exchanges between them”, Gratopp says.

Werner Leibrandt is back in the channel as COO of systems integrator holding company Axaitra.

The senior executive and former head of Microsoft’s midmarket business spent more than 20 years working for Microsoft in Germany and Redmond.

Since the beginning of the year, Leibrandt has been COO and co-owner of Axaitra, which is specifically acquiring larger Microsoft partners.

More on that will follow in a separate CRN article. For now: Axaitra has acquired several systems integrators in the DACH region, represents around 500 employees and has the hand-picked status of a Microsoft Frontier Partner.

Axaitra recently joined the Pax8 community.

“Pax8 is a strategic partner for us,” Leibrandt says.

Peer-to-peer exchange, as discussions between executives and employees operating in the same market and facing the same challenges are now called, is very much the order of the day.

Pax8 is not just part of this MSP community. It also gives MSPs and systems integrator networks such as GTIA, and particularly the large Microsoft community IAMCP, space to connect. A community within a community, so to speak, when these organisations are represented at Beyond.

Being part of that community is not mere folklore.

Of course, people occasionally talk about the old days. And that is no bad thing. But nobody wants to spend their time looking backwards.

There is no reason to, certainly not technologically, when you consider the pace of AI innovation and the opportunities available to providers.

Community matters because it can create something AI cannot, however innovative the technology might be: trust.

“Trust” was mentioned repeatedly across many of the roughly 90 presentations, sessions and keynotes at Beyond Copenhagen. It was invoked time and again and, perhaps, strengthened too.

That sense of community across a highly international MSP network will return when Beyond EMEA takes place in Madrid from 3 to 5 October 2027.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister websiteCRN DE.