CRN Channel Awards Australia: Finalist Q&A with Lindsay Keating, EVP & GM, APAC at Pax8
Lindsay Keating talks about being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards Australia
Lindsay Keating is EVP and GM of Pax8 APAC, where she leads regional growth and operations. She is an experienced executive and board member with a strong track record in scaling businesses, building high-performing teams, advising startups, and driving go-to-market strategies. Her background spans sales, ecosystem optimisation, mergers and acquisitions, and integration. Lindsay previously held senior leadership roles at Vodafone New Zealand, Microsoft in the United States, and IBM.
What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards Australia this year without giving anything away of course!
If I'm honest, the biggest reason for entering was to give the team the recognition they deserve. This has been my first full year leading the APAC business, and I've had a front-row seat to the dedication, resilience and commitment of an incredible team.
Over the past 12 months, we've continued to grow our ANZ organisation, welcomed new talent, expanded our vendor ecosystem, launched Google in Australia, and invested in new capabilities that help our partners grow and evolve. While those achievements are important, what stands out to me most is the work that happens behind the scenes. The willingness of our people to step up, support partners and each other, and do whatever it takes to deliver great outcomes.
Entering the awards was an opportunity to celebrate that collective effort. Whether we win or not, I'm incredibly proud of what the team has achieved and the impact they've made for partners across the ANZ channel community.
What would winning this award mean to both your teams and your customers/partners?
Winning would be incredibly rewarding, but more than anything it would be a reflection of the strength of the partnerships we've built across the ANZ channel community.
Success is never something we achieve on our own. Everything we do is designed to help our partners grow, whether that's through access to new vendors, new services, education, community or opportunities to evolve their business models. Winning this award would reinforce that the work we're doing together is making a real difference.
For our team, it would be a proud moment to see that impact recognised. For our partners, I'd hope it serves as recognition of what's possible when people come together around a shared goal of helping SMB businesses succeed. Ultimately, it would be a celebration of a thriving channel ecosystem and the collective success.
What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?
One of the most significant achievements over the past year has been helping our partners take their first steps from being Managed Service Providers to becoming Managed Intelligence Providers. That's more than a change in terminology. It's a fundamental shift in how partners create value, moving from managing technology to delivering intelligence, automation and business outcomes for customers.
We're helping partners prepare for an agentic future where AI agents become trusted co-workers, handling tasks, accelerating decision-making and creating new opportunities for growth. Our role is to give partners the confidence, education and pathways to lead that transformation, not simply react to it. At the same time, we've continued to build a strong and sustainable business across APAC, ensuring we have the people, ecosystem and capabilities to support our partners as they navigate the next evolution of the channel.
What lessons do you think the industry has learned over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?
Over the past year, the industry has learned that growth doesn't come from adding more products or more complexity. The partners seeing the strongest results are those that have become more intentional about where they invest their time, how they deliver value and which customer challenges they choose to solve.
The change we still need to make is moving away from transactional thinking. Too much of the industry remains focused on selling technology rather than helping customers achieve meaningful business outcomes. Customers are increasingly looking for strategic guidance, operational support and trusted expertise. That requires partners, vendors and distributors to work more closely together, share knowledge more openly and focus on long-term success rather than short-term transactions. The organisations that thrive will be those that build deeper relationships and create measurable value beyond the technology itself.
What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming 12 months? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities
The biggest opportunity for the industry over the next 12 months is helping small and medium-sized businesses move from AI curiosity to AI adoption. Many organisations understand the potential, but they're still looking for practical guidance on where to start, or how to generate measurable business outcomes from their investment. The channel is uniquely positioned to bridge that gap, bringing together a combination of AI and automation, along with intelligence to businesses that would never have the resources to build these capabilities previously.
We’re not waiting for that future to arrive; we're helping build it. We believe AI will increasingly be consumed through partners and our marketplace, not through complex one-off projects. That's why we're investing in capabilities that help partners package, deploy and manage intelligence as a service. We're creating practical pathways for partners to move beyond selling licences and into delivering outcomes, whether that's through AI agents, automation services, security solutions or entirely new recurring revenue models. The real opportunity isn't simply adopting AI. It's giving every small business access to the same intelligence and capability that was once reserved for large enterprises.
Pax8is helping partners build the confidence and capability to turn managed intelligence into practical, profitable new revenue streams. By providing both education and enablement, we're making it easier for partners to deliver solutions that solve real business challenges. We see a future where partners are not just selling technology but building solutions that help customers.
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