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Cloud distributor Pax8 on Monday announced its fee-based Wingman Professional Services program for managed service providers (MSPs) looking for help with Azure implementations. 

For Pax8 partners needing more handholding and education as they build their Azure practices, Wingman Professional Services provide MSPs access to Pax8 cloud architects and engineers to help with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) planning, assessment, design, migration, customization, and optimizing cloud solutions. 

Pax8’s Aaron Garza

“We built Professional Services based on partner demand,” Aaron Garza, vice president of business development at Pax8, told us. “Professional Services is a form of enablement to help fulfill transition to the cloud for our MSP partners.”

Another company objective is to increase Azure adoption. While the cloud distributor has seen the acceleration of Office 365 skyrocket, in terms of adoption, the Azure piece has remained a bit of a mystery to many of Pax8’s MSP partners. 

Not only does the Wingman Professional Services include a defined statement of work, but Pax8’s goal is to educate partners in the process so that down the road MSPs build the skills and knowledge to eventually build out their cloud practices. 

Pax8 launched Microsoft Azure Advisory Services earlier this year. The free 30-minute sessions are technically oriented to help answer partner’s questions. These partners tend to be more advanced when it comes to Azure implementations. 

The new Wingman Professional Services target partners who don’t have a Microsoft practice, particularly around Azure, but need help with a customer request, according to Garza. While he didn’t quote the cost of the new services, Garza did say that the rate is below the industry average, enough so that partners who participate in a paid statement of work, mark it up. 

“This is a white-glove service, but our goal in building this practice is to enable, educate and help partners expand in Microsoft,” he said. 

The list of professional services includes: IaaS deployments, networking services, digital workspace services, security, cloud and data-center services; IaaS migrations; and BitTitan email migrations.