Pax8 makes major leadership changes in the APAC region

Chris Sharp heading up new business development role at Pax8 with Lindsay Zwart replacing him.

Cloud marketplace provider Pax8 has made some major leadership changes within the APAC region with Chris Sharp stepping down as CEO, and Lindsay Zwart stepping into his role as executive vice president and general manager.

Sharp will be moving into the new global role of SVP of business development, reporting to Craig Donovan, chief experience officer at Pax8.

The CEO title that Sharp held has been replaced by EVP and general manager to standardise the titles globally across Pax8.

While he is so proud of his achievements at Pax8 and how he has grown the brand from one person to a 300-strong employee base, Sharp told CRN Australia why now was the time to move to a new role.

"The things that light me up are finding the new thing and helping us to grow into that new thing,” he explained.

"Now I will get the opportunity to look at geographic expansion for us, while not caring about the P&L the way they had to but I was running the region.

“Now I can go out and look for other new forms of partnerships that we should have as a company that we can then bring to everywhere in the world.”

He said that there is a lot of opportunity in other markets, and particularly in emerging markets, for an organisation like Pax8 to go out there and light that up.

“I get a pretty big remit, I get the opportunity to understand all of the things that are the priorities for the organisation,” Sharp said.

“I still get to sit on the executive group and understand what our strategy is, but now I get to go and look for what are the fun things? How are we going to grow into a new market?”

Meet the new APAC lead

Prior to Pax8, Zwart was the chief enterprise officer at Vodafone New Zealand, where she pioneered the digital transformation of local enterprises through the adoption of 5G, IoT, and cloud technologies.

Zwart also held leadership positions at Microsoft and IBM. While at Microsoft, Zwart was US Chief Operating Officer and GM of the multi-billion-dollar Cloud and Enterprise business, led the Azure business in the US market, and was also the GM for Dynamics, SMB, and Partner Channel Operations throughout her tenure.

She will be spending the next few months in Brisbane to meet the team and then will be based in Sydney as Pax8 will grow out its footprint there.

Zwart explained what drew her to Pax8, one of which was the way the company positions itself as a market leader.

“If I look across the ecosystem, no one else is doing what Pax8 is doing, and have the thought leadership for where the industry needs to go. I love to be a part of that being on the street leading that across our region,” she said.

“The opportunity to help transform all of our partners across APAC, Pax8 took the partners into the cloud journey, and now we have the opportunity to take them into the genetic AI journey.

“I could have joined a system integrator. I could have joined a vendor, but none of them are doing what Pax8 is doing, which is really leaning in and helping partners transform the SMB market.”

Zwart was considering going back to the US, but she said she loves the APAC region.

"APAC a is melting pot of cultures, diversity and emerging markets, and it's not a part that I've been working in before,” she said.

"I've been working at more mature markets in the past. And I wanted to do something that would help stretch and grow me.

“I haven't done that piece before, and I'm so excited to lead to lean in and really help build and grow those markets and picking up from where Sharp has started and then helped him think about expanding that. But I still have Chris as my ally, which I love, and working across the region for what we need.”

Ryan Walsh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Pax8 told CRN Australia these appointments are a part of a bigger strategy for the marketplace company.

“Part of what we're trying to do now is scale and grow the business and find more market reach, which takes both of these professionals to do,” he said.

“There's going to be a balance here between performing as the marketplace platform that we've claimed to be, and then now really transforming our business and the community with an AI agentic opportunity going forward.”

What the future holds

For the next year, Walsh said customers and partners can expect a blend of announcements and deliverables.

“From the strategic level, this balance between scale and growing this marketplace business in the channel community for small and medium sized businesses,” he said.

“You're going to continue to see releases come out demonstrating what we're doing there. At the same time, transforming ourselves, transforming our marketplace and transforming the channel to take advantage of this agentic AI opportunity.”

For Zwart, she said it is continuing building this movement with their partner ecosystem and taking them through the guided growth journey to become agentic AI partners.

"How do we lean into growing our footprint across APAC? And that's in partnership with Sharp, and some of the key areas that we want to really lean in with whether it's partnerships or acquisitions around expansion,” she said.

Zwart also wants to reposition the brand in APAC in a “big way”.

"Some of the feedback I gave to the team is I knew Pax8 when I was in the US Pax8 has a really strong brand in the US, but we need to do more investment around brand awareness across our region, and that's really important for us.”