As part of the Azure announcements at Microsoft Build, we are sharing exciting new capabilities for Azure Marketplace that allow us to reach new publisher and customer audiences. These investments are part of our continued commitment to make cloud marketplaces the best place for developers and partners to surface their offers, and for a wide variety of customers to discover and buy them in ways that meet their needs. Here’s a little bit more about each of the new capabilities.
Beyond ISVs and applications
Building on the rapid growth and positive response of Consulting Services offers on AppSource we are excited to extend this option to Azure Marketplace. Now generally available, this new listing option expands Azure Marketplace beyond ISVs and applications so that customers can find a wide range of consulting services, such as assessments, onsite workshops, proofs of concept, and implementations, each backed by a partner with deep Azure expertise. These offers help customers navigate everything from simple migrations to complex cloud deployments. For example, customers just beginning their Azure journey, can request a briefing on Wipro’s Cloud Migration Platform. Whereas customers with complex connected products can engage a 30-day proof of concept with Bright Wolf to demonstrate how their existing device data can be securely connected to Azure IoT Hub.
For partners, this offering extends the value of cloud marketplaces to our diverse partner ecosystem, enabling Systems Integrators and Managed Service Providers to showcase solutions, receive leads, and land new business.
New subscription offers for SaaS ISVs
Customers can now subscribe to SaaS services offered by Microsoft partners and get those billed as a part of their Azure subscription. These services offer a simple, flat-rate month-to-month billing, with the opportunity to scale up or opt out at any time. Over the next several months, we will be adding longer term billing options as well as usage-based pricing.
SaaS ISVs like Covenant Technologies, Apptimized, and others can now leverage Azure Marketplace to expand their sales channel and sell subscriptions through Microsoft. For example, CloudEndure sells Disaster Recovery solutions for Azure as a SaaS subscription because it reduces the friction of typical Enterprise procurement. Purchasing through Azure Marketplace lets customers reduce billing relationships and consolidate software licensing and infrastructure fees. Purchased subscriptions can all be managed within the Azure Portal and paid for via the customer’s own Azure account with their preferred payment instrument.
Private offers for Enterprise purchasing
Enterprise customers increasingly want to leverage online marketplaces to find, try and buy cloud services. Now with private offers, publishers can privately share solutions with specific customers in a variety of ways that meet Enterprise buying needs:
- Private pricing lets publishers extend discounts and off-list pricing from publicly available offerings.
- Private terms and conditions allow publishers to tailor terms and conditions to a specific customer.
- Private virtual machine images let publishers configure images for an individual customer's needs. This also enables publishers to provide preview access to new product features, before launching more broadly to all customers.
Partners like SoftNAS, Riverbed and NetApp were all eager to take advantage of these capabilities. “Private offers through the Azure Marketplace is a game changer for NetApp. The ability allows us to acquire more customers with the flexibility to negotiate as we need” said Adam Carrol, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NetApp.
Coming in the next several months, you’ll see a range of additional private marketplace features that allow Enterprises to self-select which offers from our catalog to make available to their employees. Together these features open the door to strong Enterprise adoption of cloud marketplaces allowing them to buy in the ways they expect and demand.
New containers images category
Container images and applications have also launched in preview as a new category on Azure Marketplace, letting developers choose from a selection of popular docker-formatted container images and applications. To kickoff this new capability, Bitnami has published a selection of free, OSS container images validated to run on container services in Azure, like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Instances (ACI). These images will be supported in the future for all services that support containers such as Web Apps and Service Fabric. Also stay tuned for multi-container images, and additional billing options.
We have a lot more in development that I look forward to sharing with you. Let us know what you think and come be part of the momentum. Find all the new offerings at Azure Marketplace, and learn more about these new capabilities in our Publisher Guide.