Microsoft Channel Chief Dezen Calls Revamped Marketplace ‘A Single, Holistic Catalog’

‘This is going to be a single, holistic catalog and destination for customers of all sizes to discover these solutions,’ Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen says.

Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global channel partner sales, sees the revamped Microsoft Marketplace as a simpler method for application discovery, purchasing and deployment that will aid its various types of partners, from resellers to independent software vendors, with reaching more users for artificial intelligence products and services.

“This is going to be a single, holistic catalog and destination for customers of all sizes to discover these solutions,” Dezen told CRN in an interview. “We’re really grateful for the incredible work across the partner ecosystem. This is where we see work from SIs (system integrators), from software development companies (also known as ISVs) as well as our channel really converging together to deliver marketplace capability at scale.”

For channel partners, the marketplace will enable further customer reach and faster time-to-value delivery, Dezen (pictured above) said. Just three months into the fiscal year, Microsoft has seen customer purchases of AI products through the marketplace double. More than 6 million people visit the Microsoft marketplace each month.

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Microsoft Marketplace

As an example of how Microsoft partners are transforming their business to meet customer needs in the AI era, Nyasha Tunduwani, founder of Seattle-based Microsoft solution provider Real Impact, told CRN in a recent interview that he and his team have been building greater capabilities around Microsoft’s Fabric analytics platform.

Fabric is one of Microsoft’s tools that is making data accessible and usable beyond back-end analysts, representing the promise of new AI tools democratizing data insight for a larger share of the workforce, Tunduwani said. His company does a workshop on becoming a Fabric analyst in a day that has proven popular.

“I don’t want to call us ‘plumbers,’ but we’re essentially putting [in] that back-end infrastructure, knitting those pieces together,” he said.

Making AI apps and agents available through the marketplace should cut down on configuration time and lower operating costs, according to Microsoft. Distributors that are integrating the Microsoft Marketplace catalog into their own marketplaces include Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD Synnex.

Microsoft Marketplace launch partners include CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500 members Infosys, Avanade, Kyndryl, Cognizant and Capgemini.

In the coming weeks and months, visitors to Azure Marketplace and AppSource pages will get redirected to Microsoft Marketplace, according to the vendor.

The Redmond, Wash.-based vendor, which has about 500,000 partners worldwide, is “taking care of all that back-end stuff for partners” as part of the Microsoft Marketplace roll out, Dezen said.

“What partners need to know is this is a phenomenal opportunity for them to showcase all of the great work they’ve been doing around cloud solutions, AI apps, agents,” she said.

Here’s more of what Dezen told CRN about the new marketplace, growing customer use of the vendor’s online marketplace and the continued importance of distributors for the Microsoft channel.

What do you want partners to know about the new Microsoft Marketplace?

Think of this as the trusted source where cloud solutions, AI apps and agents all converge together. This is all about delivering AI transformation for our customers.

Every single month, there are more than 6 million people that visit the Microsoft marketplace.

We have a really comprehensive catalog across our cloud solutions for multiple industries. And this is really designed to have a highly integrated process for everything from discovery, use, purchase and deployment.

Do partners need to do anything if they have solutions listed on AppSource and Azure Marketplace?

We’re taking care of all that back-end stuff for partners. What partners need to know is this is a phenomenal opportunity for them to showcase all of the great work they’ve been doing around cloud solutions, AI apps, agents.

This is going to be a single, holistic catalog and destination for customers of all sizes to discover these solutions.

We’re really grateful for the incredible work across the partner ecosystem. This is where we see work from SIs (system integrators), from software development companies (also known as independent software vendors, or ISVs) as well as our channel really converging together to deliver marketplace capability at scale.

(As for AppSource and Azure Marketplace), everything integrates into the Microsoft Marketplace. This is the destination for everything.

The data tells us this is material. There’s significant demand.

Less than three months into our fiscal year, we’ve already seen a 2X growth in customers that are purchasing AI products through our marketplace.

To serve this demand, we already have more than 3,000 AI-focused solutions that will be listed as part of this launch.

And the forward-looking data is really compelling. IDC (research firm International Data Corp.) is projecting that by 2028, more than 1.3 billion AI agents will be in operation.

In order for customers to access that, they will continue to heavily rely on our partner ecosystem. And we see the Microsoft Marketplace as the destination for this.

What are some of the compelling AI use cases you are seeing from the channel?

It’s been really motivating to see agents for horizontal work as well as vertical work.

You’re going to see more and more opportunity for partners that have highly specialized capability, whether that’s for industries–or horizontal work like process management, order workflows, etcetera.

We’re seeing all of that come to life in the marketplace. We’ve seen a massive amount of energy from our software development companies that are publishing these tools alongside the AI solutions that they’ve been publishing in our marketplace for quite some time.

And then the other exciting part of this is we’re expanding capability through the channel now. We have five distributors that are part of our announcement this week. Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD Synnex.

They’ve already integrated our catalog. This is actually going to enable partners to reach even more customers and deliver faster time-to-value. We’re extending our reach to more customers than we ever have before with the partners and the channel ecosystem that they work with so closely every day.

Does distribution keep growing in importance for Microsoft partners, especially with changes like eligibility requirement changes likely pushing more direct partners to work with distribution?

I’m incredibly proud of the work that our distribution ecosystem does every single day.

And distribution is absolutely core to Microsoft’s strategy. And it’s one of the reasons I’m so excited that we have these five distributors as part of this week’s announcement.

They play an instrumental role in reaching customers, particularly small and medium businesses. And these are customers in particular that will benefit so much from having highly qualified, capable, validated solutions that they can access through the distribution channel that they work with across their business and supported by Microsoft.

(As for eligibility changes), we announced a series of authorization changes designed to demonstrate to our customers that they can deeply trust Microsoft and the Microsoft partner ecosystem.

And so this is about continually delivering on that promise of having the most qualified, the most capable, the most secure and the highest-skilled partners in the ecosystem. That’s as true for our direct-bill authorized partners as it is for our distribution partners.

With so many vendors having a marketplace and distributors having marketplaces, what makes this Microsoft Marketplace stand out?

One of the things that is really exciting and differentiated about Microsoft’s marketplace is that all of these solutions are integrated for and validated for their capability with Microsoft’s products.

Customers that are leveraging their investment in (Microsoft AI tool) Copilot, as an example, can also get the access they need to these agents and apps.

I’m really excited for what our partners are going to do with this new capability that’s really unique for Microsoft. And the customer demand for this is material.

I think about Marketplace as another dimension of our co-sell capability. And so this is a place where partners can build adjacent businesses, extend the business models that they have, build new business models.

The marketplace is co-sell at scale. It’s 24-by-seven digital commerce. And it’s the home of the AI solutions, the apps and agents that customers need in order to run their businesses.

How will Microsoft continue to iterate on Marketplace?

We’re just getting started. This week’s announcements are the first wave of new capability.

This is about unifying the experience in the Microsoft Marketplace, simplifying publishing for agents and new channel-led capabilities like resale-enabled offers.

This is about how we invest in partner capability so that they can expand their reach. They can differentiate themselves in the market based on their unique capability, and they can deliver trusted outcomes in partnership with Microsoft.

Of course, we do all of this through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (MAICPP). This is where we’ll continue to invest in the tools, the resources, the skilling and the benefits partners need in order to be successful.

(For) every channel partner, there’s meaningful business and opportunity for them in the marketplace. This is why I’m quite excited about the five distribution partners that we’re announcing this week, as well as resale-enabled offers for the channel.

Channel partners are building agents, and this is a fantastic place for them to showcase those skills as well.

Customers that have made a Microsoft Azure (Consumption) Commitment can leverage the marketplace to get the world’s greatest solutions from our partner ecosystem.

Customers that have made a commitment to Microsoft are eager to see what new solutions and capability they can include in their MACC. And that’s certainly first-party solutions from Microsoft as well as solutions from our partners.

And it’s one of the beautiful things about the marketplace is they can access those partner solutions and agents and tools.