Partners across the board face similar challenges, including staffing and retention. Companies seek strategies to maintain continuity in a constantly changing job market. Security remains a top priority, with partners seeking to expand their customer base and streamline operations. In turn, customers prioritize trustworthy software solutions. With tightening budgets, every company needs to achieve more with fewer resources and less money. As customers move to the cloud, they face the common challenge of managing environments both in the cloud and on-premises.
In 2022, Forrester Consulting conducted a commissioned study on behalf of AWS to explore the trends in the emergence of online marketplaces among procurement and IT decision-makers. The study revealed that today's top business priorities emphasize responsiveness to customer needs, agility in adapting to change, and resilience against risks. To achieve these goals, organizations need timely access to the right software and data. The study highlighted that 85% of procurement decision-makers leverage online marketplaces to improve business agility and speed up the procurement process for cloud software and data.
AWS Marketplace
At AWS, everything begins with understanding customer needs. This drives decisions on what to build, where to invest, and how to innovate. Many customers seek help finding products, and the AWS Marketplace provides a wide range of trusted vendor products, enabling organizations to access IT infrastructure software such as security and DevOps tools, business applications, datasets, and solutions tailored to specific industry needs. Customers who use AWS Marketplace benefit from features designed to streamline procurement, making it both fast and cost-effective. AWS supports customers in accelerating their modernization efforts with new approaches to their software supply chain. Customers aim to strengthen governance and control while managing expanding cloud infrastructures, seeking to minimize risks when integrating new third-party tools. AWS Marketplace pioneered launch features that ensure end-users purchase from pre-approved vendors and introduced tools to help administrators consolidate license tracking and management into a single, centralized location.
Key value of AWS Marketplace for ISVs and channel partners
AWS Marketplace is the preferred platform for B2B software transactions, serving as the default mechanism for co-selling with AWS. AWS Marketplace enables scaling partners' businesses and leveraging the AWS field to align them to reach more customers. It also helps customers to find products within the Marketplace, ensuring that the available products are secure and easily deployable for their specific needs. AWS continues to invest in and provide additional tools for driving revenue growth through joint business success. AWS supports expanding global reach, enhancing business performance, and increasing profitability through the implementation of efficient tools, programs, and platforms, ensuring the best possible partner experience.
AWS Marketplace value for partners
Deal acceleration: AWS helps streamline the procurement process for customers, making it easier for those who have purchased through AWS Marketplace to buy new products.
Aligns for scale: When your company adopts Marketplace and establishes operations, it becomes a repeatable process. AWS is constantly exploring ways to help partners scale their businesses.
Grow your business: ISVs that develop a co-selling strategy with AWS have experienced increased breadth and depth of customer engagement. Data insights help target the right customers and enable flexible payment options through a flexible payment scheduler.
Accelerating sales with AWS Marketplace
AWS always starts by understanding the customer's problem and how they can provide assistance. Field teams are trained to understand the customer's problems. When partners approach solving a customer's problem in the same way, AWS aligns its efforts with co-selling. AWS finds that co-selling with partners is the most effective strategy for helping customers. AWS has hundreds of services and thousands of partners. A typical AWS field sales representative positions services and solutions by first understanding the customer's problem. The AWS field team listens to customers to identify the exact issue that needs addressing. Partners achieve the highest success rates when they identify a customer and collaborate with AWS field teams to ensure that deploying solutions on AWS effectively solves the customer's problem with confidence.
AWS Marketplace value for ISVs
In 2022, AWS commissioned a study with Forrester to understand the benefits ISVs are experiencing from the Marketplace. The study revealed that 81% of ISVs achieved their ROI within a year, enjoyed 80% larger deal sizes, had a 27% higher win rate, and experienced a 40% faster sales cycle. As a result, SaaS sales nearly doubled in 2022, with sellers selling billions of dollars of SaaS products on AWS Marketplace. Partners choose to transact on the Marketplace for various reasons, including access to existing funding mechanisms, alignment with the AWS field team's compensation, the ability to co-sell with AWS, expanded reach and access, and a simplified contracting and procurement process.
AWS Marketplace value for channel partners
AWS Marketplace collaborates with ISV and channel partners to enable software delivery. Many AWS ISV partners maintain longstanding relationships with their channels, which AWS Marketplace supports through channel private offers. As of 2022, over 2000 channel partners have enrolled to conduct transactions on AWS Marketplace.
Benefits of AWS Marketplace for customers
Choice
Customers value choice and seek to benefit from AWS Marketplace while maintaining their established relationships with channel partners, solution providers, and distributors. AWS supports this by offering options such as channel partner private offers, solution provider private offers, and distributed seller of record programs. Customers have traditionally relied on Marketplace for their infrastructure procurement, security, storage, and DevOps tool needs. Now, they are also turning to Marketplace for business applications, machine learning models, data sets, and industry-specific solutions. With a catalogue featuring over 15,000 listings, AWS provides a wide array of products and solutions from trusted partners. Each product undergoes evaluation before being listed on the Marketplace, and AWS continuously monitors the catalogue for vulnerabilities.
Streamlined risk assessments
Once customers find what they need and are ready to make a procurement, AWS streamlines their risk assessments through Vendor Insights. This feature allows customers to search and filter products that meet both their technical and business requirements, as well as their security and compliance criteria. Using Vendor Insights, customers can save up to eight to ten weeks in their procurement and risk assessment cycles. Also, customers no longer need to conduct manual checks annually; they can sign up for alerts to be notified of any changes in the security or compliance status of products they procure through Marketplace.
Simplified procurement
AWS offers a feature called Standardized Marketplace Contracts, developed with extensive input from a community of partners and customers. This feature eliminates the need for customers to involve their legal teams in every transaction and with every partner or product. Instead, they can use a single template for contracting across multiple partners in Marketplace. Over half of the products in the AWS Marketplace catalogue leverage standardized contracts for their public-facing users.
Centralized governance
AWS continues to invest in centralized governance solutions. Customers can establish a private Marketplace for their organization, where only products approved by their procurement teams are included in the catalogue. This ensures that builders and business users within the organization procure and deploy only pre-approved software. With license management capabilities, customers can distribute licenses for software procured through Marketplace, ensuring they are allocated only to authorized users within the organization. Also, AWS offers CloudTrail integration and consolidates these features into a unified dashboard. Through this single pane of glass interface, organizations can monitor usage, costs, and subscription activities across the entire organization.
Benefits of AWS Marketplace for partners
Improved discovery
Customers discover partners and their solutions through Marketplace, leveraging this platform to build relationships with these partners. Discovery is a crucial part of this process. AWS continuously invests in improving discovery for customers, focusing on search engine optimization to enhance the visibility of partner solutions and product details pages in search engine results. Also, they invest in context discovery and transactions through AWS service consoles, allowing high-intent buyers to find and transact partner solutions easily, thereby increasing conversion rates. Also, AWS seeks ways for customers to evaluate and explore products in the Marketplace, such as offering SaaS free trials.
APIs integration
Through APIs and integrations, ISVs, channel partners, distributors, and strategic partners can build websites to sell AWS Marketplace products not only on the Marketplace itself but also on other platforms. This ensures that ISVs continue to conduct business with AWS and enjoy the same benefits as they would in the Marketplace. It significantly expands partners' reach, transforming Marketplace from a single-venue website into a multi-venue platform. This flexibility allows ISVs to sell their solutions directly on their websites using AWS technology, giving them full control over conversion processes. Moreover, it enables channel partners and distributors specializing in specific industries to create their own Marketplaces using AWS technology, tailoring products to meet specific industry needs.
Partner experience transformation
Through partner experience transformation, AWS has made several enhancements to improve partner interactions. AWS is integrating Partner Central and Marketplace experiences, allowing partners to find all their business information in one place with the right data access permissions and policies. New and existing partners and Marketplace sellers can connect their Partner Central and Marketplace accounts along with associated users. This unified experience enables partners to build, publish their offerings, and create a Marketplace listing within Partner Central. As a result, there is a single, unified listing for both co-sell and Marketplace transactions.
Reference:
AWS re:Invent 2023
