How Channel Partners Are Accelerating Business Through AWS Marketplace

By Lauren Drigotas, Sr. Channel Program Manager – AWS

“AWS Partner Experience Transformation” is a blog series on updates to the AWS Partner Programs, AWS Marketplace, and Partner Central.

Channel Partners are increasingly transacting through AWS Marketplace to deliver greater value to their customers, with benefits like simplified procurement and consolidated billing.

As a result, Channel Partners are experiencing benefits to grow their business, including accelerating deal closure, expanding reach, optimizing costs, and extended value to Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

This post is for preferred Channel Partners, including Value Added Resellers, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Global System Integrators (GSIs) to learn how AWS is investing in an enhanced AWS Marketplace experience. This includes benefits available to Channel Partners, and how they can build on AWS to expand their customer reach and accelerate sales with AWS Marketplace.

Why Partner with AWS?

As part of the AWS Partner experience transformation, we’re tailoring the partner experience to help organizations drive more profitability and customer value.

Based on the Global Partner Ecosystem Multiplier study by Canalys, partners with a breadth of offerings and deep AWS engagements can achieve a $6.40 multiplier per $1 AWS sold. Additionally, the Total Economic Impact (TEI) Partner Opportunity Analysis by Forrester suggests that customers spend 80% more on third-party independent software vendor (ISV) applications through AWS Marketplace.

The TEI study also showed that Sellers close a higher percentage of deals (27%), with 40% faster sales cycle time and 20% incremental sale pipeline when transacting in AWS Marketplace. These studies show that the biggest barriers for AWS Partners to realize their full potential is having limited breadth of services or not selling through AWS Marketplace.

To help partners scale their offerings in AWS Marketplace and deliver greater customer value, we’ve made key operational and self-service enhancements to AWS Marketplace.

“Our goal is that AWS Marketplace isn’t just for ISVs,” says Ruba Borno, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Channels & Alliances. “We have global systems integrators putting their offers in AWS Marketplace who are realizing net-new logos because they’re getting access to customers they didn’t have before.”

Not only has AWS Marketplace expanded customer opportunities for preferred Channel Partners, it allows them to have direct relationships with customers. Channel Partners own these relationships in AWS Marketplace and are provided AWS resources and support to grow their business.

Selling Through AWS Marketplace as a Channel Partner

AWS Marketplace allows Channel Partners to sell third-party software, as well as their own services and solutions—an improved experience compared to standard routes to market.

In a traditional reselling model, a vendor provides product discounts, deal registration, and backend rebates to Channel Partners, who service and provide software to end customers. Channel Partners are invoiced after agreed-upon payment terms, and then payment is made to the vendor.

AWS Marketplace has improved this experience with Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPO). With this experience, software vendors authorize the resale of their software to Channel Partners at a given discount. This can be for multiple uses or single use.

Here’s how it works:

• CPPO enables Channel Partners to resell software with their added margins for any after-sales support and service.
• The Channel Partner extends the private offer to the customer, making the Channel Partner the seller of record.
• When a customer accepts the private offer and makes payment, AWS disburses payment to both the ISV and Channel Partner at the same time.
• The ISV receives their wholesale price and Channel Partners receive their margin that was included for the transaction.
• Channel Partners don’t pay any transaction fee to AWS, and whatever margin is added to the transaction is disbursed to the Channel Partner.
• Channel Partners are able to track all of their transactions in the billed revenue and collections and disbursement dashboards in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.

Channel Partners can tailor an offer for customers with CPPO. With features to customize pricing, duration, and end-user license terms, Channel Partners can simplify the procurement process, maintain relationships with their customers, and provide flexibility and governance.

Figure 1 – Workflow for creating a Channel Partner Private Offer.

Benefits for Channel Partners

Channel Partners can list professional services and software-based offerings—in addition to reselling third-party software—to take advantage of AWS Marketplace benefits, including:

• Increased reach: Over 330,000 customers use AWS Marketplace to find, buy, deploy, and govern third-party software, data, and professional services and offers. There is software in AWS Marketplace across 70 categories, totaling more than 13,000 transactable listings. With so many software offerings, Channel Partners can easily support customers’ use cases.
• Streamlined process: AWS Marketplace makes it simpler for partners to transact. Through CPPO, AWS Marketplace automatically disburses payment to the ISV and Channel Partner, eliminates the need for a purchase order, and reduces friction during the offer approval stage with standardized contracts. The simplified procurement process results in shorter sales cycles and faster time to revenue.
• No transaction fees: Through AWS Marketplace, Channel Partners don’t pay a transaction fee, which means transactions through AWS Marketplace do not impact margins from third-party software sales.
• Customer incentives: AWS Marketplace offers promotions and incentives such as AWS Marketplace CPPO promotions to provide AWS credits to customers.
• Training, GTM resources, and support: Channel Partners can learn role-specific AWS Marketplace best practices with the AWS Marketplace Training Academy, receive onboarding support, and access go-to-market (GTM) resources.
• AWS co-sell support: Channel partners can receive co-sell support from AWS Field Sellers, introducing new and expanded customer opportunities.
• Offer value beyond the transaction: Channel Partners are able to offer benefits beyond the transaction, such as offer customization, services, customer financing, and management of the customer’s environment. This provides value to end customers they cannot receive from procuring software-as-a-service (SaaS) products directly.
• Automate and scale: Through AWS Marketplace APIs, Channel Partners can automate some manual processes associated with the private offer process, integrate the AWS Marketplace offer process with existing workflows, and track metering and software usage to ensure accurate measurement of customer usage, timely invoicing, and improved financial management of resources.

Softcat is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that’s a leading UK IT reseller with 20+ years experience delivering IT solutions. Softcat provides bespoke, innovative end-to-end technology solutions that help organizations succeed.

“For Softcat, ease of doing business is a number one priority—AWS Marketplace empowers us to deliver on this,” says Paris King, Head of Cloud Alliances at Softcat. “Through Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPO), we can maximize our vendor relationships and commercial management capabilities to offer customers greater discounts, enabling them to reduce their costs.

“Customers procuring via AWS Marketplace can see the benefits from their investments quicker than ever, allowing them to truly increase the pace of change within their organization,” adds King. “AWS Marketplace enables us to provide end-to-end value to customers as they navigate through the public cloud, as well as being an exciting route for us to strengthen our relationships with new and emerging vendors.”

Become an AWS Marketplace Channel Partner

To start accelerating your business through AWS Marketplace, visit the AWS Marketplace Channel Journey page and learn how to onboard.

You can also check out the “AWS Partner Experience Transformation” blog series to learn how partners can scale their offerings in AWS Marketplace, while lowering operating costs and accelerating time-to-close.