What does the cloud marketplace space look like in five years?

The B2B software budget and the cloud budgets are becoming one. This is the next great cloud migration and a massive opportunity over the next five years.

With my ISV hat on, today you may still have single-digit percentage of sales people inside of ISVs who know how to win with cloud go-to-market. Five years from now, this will be a default play. It’ll be a default path to market for every seller. Every seller will know how to win with cloud.

It won’t be the only way. It’s not like 100 percent of the dollars are going to flow there, but we do this State of Cloud Marketplaces Report every year, and this year, 44 percent of our ISVs said they will do 10 percent of their business through Marketplace in 2023. … It’s powered by the cloud budgets. I got really excited by that 44 percent of sellers thinking it will be 10 percent this year alone, and we’re really still in the early days.

I’d say 2017 through 2019 was very much the early adopter mode. 2019 is when we went from AWS really having a leadership position, to Microsoft and Google starting to emulate the similar programs that AWS had put in place. We’re past the early adopter curve now where most ISVs have acknowledged this go-to-market route that works and it’s one that they want to scale.

The projection for 2023 is about $15 billion of software will flow through the hyperscale cloud marketplaces. Canalys research says by 2025, they expect that number to be $45 billion. So that means growth percentage rates are in the high 80s [for cloud marketplaces] compared to core cloud service growth rates of around 30 percent for the hyperscalers.