AWS Marketplace Announces New AWS Marketplace Metering Service For 3rd Party Sellers

Kamlesh Talreja is the Director of Engineering for AWS Marketplace. 

Do you sell on AWS Marketplace?

If so, you’re likely familiar with the benefits your customers get from AWS Marketplace, including pay-as-you-go pricing and simple deployment options. AWS Marketplace is our fast growing online store that helps customers discover, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. It’s an increasingly influential channel for ISVs, AWS Channel Resellers, and Systems Integrators (SIs) to offer software products and services to customers in AWS Marketplace’s multi-region footprint. Amazon EC2 hours deployed by AWS Marketplace listed products in 2015 grew to a record 143 million EC2 hours per month.

At AWS, we’re always adding new features based on the requests of our customers and software vendors. When we launched in April 2012, sellers could only list products on AWS Marketplace using hourly and monthly pricing. In 2014, the addition of new features allowed sellers to price their products under an additional annual pricing model. Even with these options, sellers couldn’t list certain products on AWS Marketplace and customers had to buy products in ways that, in some cases, didn’t match the value they received. Today, the AWS Marketplace team is happy to announce a software metering service that supports new pricing dimensions such as users, hosts, and data. After a seller integrates their product with AWS Marketplace Metering Service, that product will emit an hourly record capturing the usage of any single pricing dimension. Buyers can then easily subscribe to software priced by this new dimension on the AWS Marketplace website and only pay for what they use.

What does this mean for customers?

Many types of software provide value to customers based on the number of hosts the software manages, the amount of data it processes, or the number of users it allows. By permitting AWS Marketplace sellers to list products priced along these dimensions, customers who buy software on AWS Marketplace can now easily scale usage up and down on products that integrate with the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service. This better matches how customers want to pay and better matches the value they derive from software they buy on AWS Marketplace.

What does this mean for APN Partners who sell, or want to sell, on AWS Marketplace?

If you’re a software vendor selling on AWS Marketplace, chances are you are one of the over 100 sellers who have told us that you’d like the option to price your software on dimensions that reflect the value you deliver to your customers. Using the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service, you can now charge along the top dimensions.  This additional pricing flexibility opens the door for you to both modify your current product offering to use this feature, AND to bring new solutions to AWS Marketplace, and enables you to meet your customers’ needs in a seamless and scalable fashion.

“We are winning more buyers because they have the flexibility to buy our software in the way that meets their needs,” said Partha Panda, VP of Global Channel and Strategic Alliance, at Trend Micro. “We were able to quickly integrate with the AWS Marketplace Metering Service and begin selling our Deep Security Manager on a per host protected model. Our customers are now charged in the way that is aligned with the way AWS charges their customers, and they pay in the way they want, on their existing AWS bill.”

Other sellers taking advantage of flexible consumption pricing include Aspera, Chef, and SoftNAS.

When are products that support these new pricing dimensions available?

These products are available now. You can find all of them by searching AWS Marketplace. Visit https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace to get started.

How do I get started?

To register your product to use the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service, take the following steps:

• If you’re a new seller on AWS Marketplace, register by visiting AWS Marketplace, or go directly to: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/management/register/.
• Next, you will have to register your product for a new type of usage dimension. On the form, indicate the dimension you want to meter.
• Next, you’ll be able to acquire the specific productCode and usageDimension. When you register your product, you can download a SDK to help you format your metering records. You will have the option of downloading a SDK for any of the languages the AWS SDK supports.

To learn more about selling software on any of the new consumption dimensions, including the steps to modify your product to use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, visit the AWS Marketplace Seller Portal.