How AWS Marketplace is Innovating to Help Customers Modernize, Transform, and Govern

By Dave McCann, VP of Migration, Marketplace, and Control Services at AWS

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we see customers increasingly turn to AWS Marketplace to modernize the software they use, and to transform their software supply chain.

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with more than 7,000 software listings from over 1,700 independent software vendors (ISVs) that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.

If you’re an ISV, we are dedicated to helping you simplify software procurement. We also want to help you provide modernization for your customers, while transforming the efficiency and scale of your own business as you earn new customers and provision your software for them.

If you’re a Consulting Partner, Systems Integrator (SI), or Managed Service Provider (MSP), you help customers transform their software supply chain. As you’re compressing procurement cycles and accelerating time to value, you also transform your business to meet the dynamic, ever-changing needs of your customer base by more easily providing and managing the software for them.

AWS Marketplace helps you reach more customers, establish contracts faster, and automate renewals. We also enable data sharing with AWS and a co-sell motion with the AWS Sales team. This is in partnership with the AWS Partner Network (APN) and more than 50 AWS Marketplace Customer Advisors from around the world.

I’m Dave McCann, and I’m the VP of Migrations, Marketplace, and Control Services at AWS. My teams build and run a set of services focused on migration, entitlement, and governance of software and data on AWS.

I am continually looking to learn about the needs of sellers globally, so that we can build the functionality that makes running your business easier.

Enabling Sellers to Meet Customer Needs

At AWS Marketplace, we think of a partner also as a “seller” who sells a service to a buyer. For the rest of this post, I want to talk about you in the seller persona.

In 2020, we have enabled our sellers to better meet customer needs and build their business on AWS, with launches ranging from SaaS Contract Renewals to improved seller data feeds.

You can accelerate contract negotiations using our Standard Contract for AWS Marketplace, launched in Q2, and you can now control availability of your software by country, launched in Q3. These features have enabled us to transform software supply chain for both buyers and sellers, leading to tangible time savings on both sides of a transaction.

“The major benefit we have seen with having our products listed in AWS Marketplace has been the acceleration of procurement timelines for customers,” says Jabari Norton, Vice President of Global Partner Sales & Alliances at Sumo Logic (USA). “On average, deals in AWS Marketplace close 30 percent faster than direct deals.”

One of the most exciting expansions we’ve had is the enablement of ISVs and Consulting Partners from new countries around the world to sell in AWS Marketplace.

Sellers from Australia, New Zealand, Bahrain, Norway, Sweden, UAE, and Japan are now able to transact with hundreds of thousands of AWS Marketplace customers around the world. This brings more global sellers alongside partners from the US, UK, and EU.

“As organisations continue to embrace the cloud, we are seeing a demand for consolidation of services,” says Tønnes Ingebrigtsen, CEO at consulting partner mnemonic (Norway).

“Through our participation in the launch of Norway-based ISVs and consulting partners in AWS Marketplace, AWS and mnemonic customers will find their processes from procurement to deployment are not only simplified, the platform is also already familiar to many, and will mean more flexibility for our customers.”

Unlocking Innovation with the Right Tools

AWS customers from Fortune 500 enterprises to emerging startups seek to innovate faster, reduce costs, and maintain control over third-party solutions in their software portfolio.

We’ve learned that most customers have anywhere from several dozen to several hundred software suppliers. The shift to cloud results in the search for better, newer products and services. Thus, the software portfolio is under more change and modernization than ever before.

At AWS, we see this in four buying domains which Gartner calls “buying centers.” These are the CIO-level application buying center; the CISO security buying center; the infrastructure and operations buying center; and the VP of big data and analytics buying center. Procurement and legal have to service all four of these.

We understand customers can unlock innovation when they have the tools to tailor software discovery, procurement, and provisioning to the needs of multiple teams across their organization.

“AWS is transforming how software is procured and embracing how customers and partners prefer to buy and sell,” says Yannik Janssen, CEO at KeplerWorx (Dubai). “AWS Marketplace is a fantastic resource for organizations to adopt and onboard innovative solutions faster. Our experience to enlist our solution in AWS Marketplace has been seamless.”

Many customers balance building applications on AWS with software and services from AWS Partners to access the full benefits of cloud-enabled digital transformation. With AWS Marketplace, we help customers find and buy third-party software and data they need on AWS. We also help them collaborate with AWS Partners to make the procurement and deployment process as seamless as possible.

We also know that enterprises must balance the needs of developer teams, who seek speed and selection, and procurement teams, who care about controls and governance. AWS balances both of these needs, enabling fast transactions with a curated catalog of listings that are monitored 24/7.

As we get ready to close the year, I look forward to continuing to delight our customers through innovations, several that you’ll see launched at re:Invent, to help them modernize, transform, and govern.

AWS re:Invent Recap for Partners

Thank you for joining us at AWS re:Invent 2020. All of the keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakouts from re:Invent are now available on-demand, including our Global Partner Summit sessions and my Enterprise/Migration Leadership Session. To watch, log in using the credentials you created during registration.

If you missed anything from re:Invent or just want to recap, we have rounded up the most relevant launches, program updates, and educational content available for AWS Partners.

Check out our re:Invent recap on the APN Blog >>
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		Dave McCann Dave McCann is VP of Migration, Marketplace, and Control Services at AWS.
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