We are listing 9 advantages for a company, particularly an independent software vendor (ISV), to partner with a major public cloud provider while selling its applications through the Marketplace of the provider.
It is time to embrace the subscription economy of the cloud, find below why.
Advantage #1 - Top Brand
When you partner with brands like Amazon (AWS), Google (GCP) or Microsoft (Azure), you associate your company with the most recognised brands on the planet. Working officially with such major players can be only positive for your own credibility and branding. In addition, as an official partner, you will be listed on their website and therefore it will generate substantial web traffic on your own website. However, you can also work with other cloud providers which are not technically part of GAFAM like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, OVH... although less famous in a B2C world, they are extremely well known in the B2B world and major brands on their own without any debate.
Advantage #2 - Truly Global
The major cloud providers offer their services nearly everywhere in the world. Most of them are American and if we exclude some countries such as China, Iran, etc. when you list your app on their Marketplace, your first prospect might be indeed American but also Brazilian or Japanese. Yes you must be ready to be able to handle such leads but it is a tremendous opportunity to become truly global immediately. Imagine the cost in marketing if you were to be as visible as on Cloud Marketplace by your own means. Being listed on their Marketplace can be a bit costly, sometimes a few thousands euros but it is next to nothing when you think about the opportunity.
Advantage #3 - Countless Customers
Cloud providers are very large companies and have thousands of customers for the smallest of them up to 1 million for AWS. In the B2B economy, it is very impressive. The customer base is truly massive and therefore the opportunity for you to do business with them is huge. Indeed, the customers of the cloud provider have already a running contract with the cloud provider, already using a cloud budget to pay for the subscriptions and of course, using the cloud technology. Therefore, transacting with the customers of the cloud providers is fast and much easier than if you were to sell directly yourself. No need to negotiate a contract, processing the purchase order is simple even for the purchaser and of course, the payment is automatic - the cloud provider is paying you, not the customer directly. A sales cycle on a Marketplace can be up to 50% faster.
Advantage #4 - High Growth
The cloud industry is growing at a very fast pace between 20% YoY and more than 50% (thinking about GCP). It is therefore obvious that the number of customers, deal size and potential upsell is tremendous. Of course, depending on the provider or the market or the country, it varies but it is definitely growing very fast everywhere. Do not forget that if you do not take advantage of such a market your competitors will not wait for you. It is crucial for your future growth not to miss the opportunity of the cloud. But what about Marketplaces specifically? To be transparent, it is not easy to get the numbers from Cloud Providers, one can guess it must be quite similar to the overall growth of the cloud. Gartner* estimates that 25% of global 1000 companies are using cloud marketplaces. It is time to get on board.
Advantage #5 - Total Trust
The trust in the service is definitely key. Trust can be described in many subjective ways but when it comes to the rational, a customer expects security, availability, performance, continuity at the very least. It is totally impossible for an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) to provide a service as good as AWS or ServiceNow. The major public cloud providers have state of the art IT operations, fully managed. Their contractual obligation in terms of availability is typically over 99.8% and their security is second to none when it comes to protecting the data of their customers. For a customer having operations managed by Google or Microsoft staff and their automation tools is very reassuring, especially versus operations managed by an ISV.
Advantage #6 - Large Ecosystem
When you are a software vendor on a B2B Cloud Marketplace, you can touch potentially a very large number of customers but partners as well! First of all, you can co-sell with the sales team of the public cloud provider itself, yes you can have a virtual extended sales team of thousands of representatives anywhere in the world. In addition, the public cloud providers have hundreds of partners to leverage. By building and truly developing the alliance channel of the Marketplace, the partners ecosystem can be very powerful and enable many indirect sales. As an ISV, access to private capital in order to invest is often key to be successful. On the marketplace, the ISV is also visible for Venture Capital bodies, and not only the venture of the cloud provider such as Salesforce Venture or M12 (Microsoft) for instance, but also from dozen of funds working with them and simply following their investments.
Advantage #7 - Easy Deployment
Can you imagine a world where your customers always have the latest version or are able to upgrade at a click of a button? Are we talking about the Apple store? Nope, B2B Cloud Marketplaces! It is very easy for customers to install or upgrade an application. For the ISV, at last they always know for sure the version on which their customers are on. As they can control the versioning, making sure that the customers are on the latest version or just the version before, is easy and therefore can be forced on (subject to contractual clauses of course). It is no longer required to support and maintain obsolete versions, which at the same time reduces the support cost and hassle. Beyond easy and fast app deployment, some Marketplaces can be managed privately, allowing secured deployment within a private organisation domain.
Advantage #8 - Real Innovation
Innovation is a never-ending race. It is very comforting to know that the ISVs can leverage the pace of innovation of the cloud providers in many different fields such as AI, IoT, ML, Mobile UX. The list of amazing features is very long and cannot be replicated by any ISV. Public cloud providers are investing like never before and ISVs by using those available technologies can take advantage of all of them with, as investment, only the integration with their own app. At Bravenn we also believe that by relying on the cloud IT ops, the ISVs can concentrate their creativity on a better functional response to their customers requirements without having to care about storage or continuity. They can innovate faster in this never-stopping world. Finally, when releasing their innovations, in a very short time if not instantly, they can push them to their customers environments, pushing immediate value and therefore increasing the perception of the customer that their software vendor is at the cutting edge of the technology and innovation.
Advantage #9 - Modern Agility
Cloud providers also offer an outstanding complete DevOps tool kit to develop, release and maintain the apps. They share technologies which allow the ISV to build apps in a fast and modular manner while using modern languages used by millions of developers. They also support API gateways to allow microservices architecture and SDKs, in short open and scalable architecture. Actually, they either promote common development frameworks such as DevOps and simply invent the industry standards like Kubernetes containers which were created at the start by Google. In short, they define the standards of the IT industry that any modern ISVs has to adopt.
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