9. Cloud Marketplaces On The Rise

“AWS marketplace is such an important channel for our partners now,” said Doug Yeum, then-AWS worldwide channel and alliances head, speaking during The Channel Company’s Best of Breed Virtual Event Series in January.

While Yeum was obviously speaking about AWS, he might as well have been referring to the entire IT channel. In a trend that’s been building in recent years and accelerated in 2021, cloud marketplaces are becoming the way that IT vendors promote and deliver their software and services.

AWS itself has been a pacesetter here. In December 2020, for example, AWS began allowing partners to quote and bill professional services directly through the AWS marketplace digital catalog of ISV offerings. In January 2021, AWS enabled customers to create multiple Private Marketplace catalogs of approved software. And in May Stephen Orban, the new AWS Marketplace general manager, promised more private marketplace innovation, additional industry-specific solutions, improved governance and international expansion for AWS Marketplace this year.

But Microsoft’s Azure cloud marketplace is having the biggest impact driving sales for partners with 71 percent of solution providers ranking it as the marketplace from where they have most increased their managed or professional services business, according to research from The Channel Company, parent company of CRN, that was presented at the XChange+ 2021 conference in August.

Microsoft was followed by the AWS marketplace at 61 percent, the Google Cloud marketplace at 50 percent, the IBM marketplace at 32 percent and the Oracle marketplace at 27 percent.

Microsoft, meanwhile, drew applause from partners in July when the company announced it was cutting its commercial marketplace fees from 20 percent of transactions to 3 percent.

In March, Hewlett Packard Enterprise launched an initiative to make its GreenLake as-a-service offerings available through distributor cloud marketplaces, striking deals with Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Synnex and Arrow.

Online marketplaces are also becoming the way major distributors move software through the channel to end-customers. TechData’s StreamOne cloud marketplace, bolstered by its Cloud Practice Builder and Click-to-Run Solutions, is gaining momentum while Synnex has bet big on its own Stellr marketplace platform. (The two distributors merged earlier this month.) And Ingram Micro Cloud has become more than the distributor’s vehicle for transacting business: The platform is the core of its partner ecosystem with an API that partners use to connect their eCommerce, CRM, ERP and billing systems.