Your Biggest Untapped Opportunity — The Azure MarketplaceTest
By: Gil Ron
Tags: Microsoft, Startup, Cloud Computing, Azure Cloud, Azure

There’s no doubt that Microsoft Azure offers a unique opportunity for today’s Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Whatever your product or service, the marketplace is your chance to back your offering with the might of Microsoft itself. In fact, Azure describes the marketplace as “the launchpad for joint go-to-market activities with Microsoft that can help accelerate your business growth.” Here’s what you need to know.

Azure is the Most Popular Cloud Platform for Enterprises

More than 95% of Fortune 500 businesses utilize Azure for their business needs. Stop to think about that for a moment. That’s nearly every single big spender in the enterprise world, window shopping on the Azure marketplace. As part of their relationship with the Cloud giant, they will likely have an Azure budget that they need to spend on Marketplace solutions, making it easier than ever for these buyers to reach for what you’re selling if it’s been made available. You can even package your offering for specific industry use cases, helping enterprises to find your product exactly when they need it.

Imagine the traditional process involved in reaching the right buyer in any Fortune 500 company with your own resources alone. Instead, by deploying your software solution on Azure, you can reach these companies with little to no marketing effort on your part. Your product is no longer unverified and unheard of, you’re leveraging the might of Azure, and providing your buyers the confidence that you’ve been vetted, approved, and checked out by the best Cloud experts in the business. Check the right boxes, and Microsoft will even start promoting and selling your software on your behalf, in a similar way to channel partners.

Understanding Transactable vs Listed Solutions

We often get asked by our customers what the difference is between having a listed product on the marketplace and achieving transactable status. This is a key point to understand, and one which a partner should be able to help you with. Becoming either listed or transactable on the Azure marketplace will take a similar amount of time and effort, but a transactable solution will come with a lot more benefits.

For example, transactable solutions can be bought directly from the Azure marketplace, without a legal or procurement process involved. Users will be able to use their Azure budget to buy your solution directly, and then you will be paid efficiently by Microsoft, with a small cut of between 10%-20%. We discuss the process of becoming transactable in more detail in our white paper, which you can download below.

Getting Started on the Azure Marketplace

Whether you’re already on Azure, but not deployed on the marketplace, or whether you’re still skirting around the edges of committing to Azure, you’re leaving a huge, untapped opportunity on the table. The Azure Marketplace is a ready audience of big names, with Azure budget burning a hole in their pockets, and looking for a solution exactly like your own.

To get started, you need to understand what Azure expects of you in order to qualify. Our latest white paper answers questions like:

What’s the difference between a listed, and a transactable solution?

How do I achieve co-sell status, so that Microsoft will promote my software for me?

What will Azure need from my business to verify my solution?

How do I accelerate the process of deploying on the marketplace?

Download the white paper right here, take note of any additional questions you might have, and then let us know when you’d like to schedule a call with one of our Azure experts.