In this era of accelerating change and AI-driven industry transformation, companies are increasingly turning to the cloud for all aspects of their business. This surge in innovation is driving an increased demand for even more cloud solutions. While independent procurement of these solutions can sometimes be required, uncoordinated purchasing may result in inconsistent contracts, redundant features, and security risks due to inadequate vetting and unfamiliar vendors. With the day-to-day advancements being made in AI, this challenge may grow even more acute as organizations and employees feel the pressure to acquire the tools they need immediately.

To address these concerns, cloud marketplaces offer a promising solution by streamlining procurement processes and providing a central point of control. In a world of complex dealmaking, the Microsoft commercial marketplace simplifies and accelerates B2B tech commerce by connecting you to our broad partner network to find, try, buy, and deploy business and technology solutions quickly, easily, and with confidence. With marketplace, cloud solutions ranging from infrastructure to AI come from one trusted source and are billed directly to your Azure invoice, taking complexity out of the purchasing process.

“At Mars, the marketplace provides us with the agility to manage our cloud portfolio as our business needs change. We gain efficiencies with consumption-based pricing, get the most value out of our Azure consumption commitment, and feel confident that the solutions we’re purchasing are pre-certified to run on Azure.”

—Matthew Hillegass, Commercial Director, Infrastructure and Information Security, Mars Global Services.

Streamline procurement with custom deals and agile governance

Custom deal-making through private offers allows you to collaborate directly with software providers to craft personalized solutions. With private offers, you can negotiate pricing, customize terms and conditions, and experiment with prototypes or proof of concepts before making a commitment. Microsoft partners that are selling through marketplace can create a private offer for you in minutes.

If you prefer to work with a channel partner, they can help you source software as a service (SaaS) solutions and procure them on your behalf with multiparty private offers. Now available for United States customers, multiparty private offers unlock additional ways for you to get the solutions you need through the marketplace.

As cloud budgets expand to accommodate the growing need for SaaS and cloud solutions, the role of governance is more important than ever. The marketplace enables you to centralize your investments within Azure as well as create a private Azure Marketplace that acts as a walled garden of approved applications, meaning employees can browse the catalog but only deploy approved solutions. If a solution is needed that is not within your private marketplace, it can easily be submitted for administrator review, empowering innovation with the appropriate guardrails.

Spend smarter by maximizing cloud investments

As cloud investments increase, customers are looking to maximize value. Microsoft automatically counts 100 percent of eligible marketplace purchases toward your Azure consumption commitment. With the most comprehensive partner ecosystem, there are thousands of eligible solutions that count towards your commitment, making it easy to unlock discounts on your Azure infrastructure. Eighty-five percent of enterprise customers with consumption commitments are spending smarter by procuring partner solutions through the marketplace, and more customers are recognizing how to harness additional value from their cloud investments with a 40 percent increase in customers signing commitments.

Whether you’re looking to deploy AI solutions, build new applications, modernize your data estate, or migrate applications and workloads to Azure, there are solutions available through the Microsoft commercial marketplace that will meet your business needs while allowing you to take advantage of consumption commitments.

Find the solutions you need

More partners are adopting the Microsoft commercial marketplace—we’ve seen a 60 percent increase in solutions available on the marketplace—offering a robust catalog to solve almost all your technology challenges. As the marketplace catalog continues to grow, valued partners such as Elastic, HashiCorp, and NetApp are leading the way. Together, in the past fiscal year, these partners have seen a 171 percent increase in volume¹, signaling the benefit to customers in streamlining procurement and consolidating their cloud portfolio through marketplace.

Here’s a sample of available solutions from these partners:

Elastic, Elastic Cloud: Elastic was this year’s recipient of two of our Marketplace Partner of the Year awards—US and global. With their Azure-native AI search service, Elastic offers its customers one-click provisioning from Azure. Using Marketplace, users can deploy Elastic’s solutions across dozens of internal teams, resulting in faster time-to-value to find the answers that matter from all data, in real time, and at scale.

HashiCorp, Terraform: Terraform is the world’s most widely used provisioning product. It can be used as an organization’s single control plane—using infrastructure as code to automate the management of servers, databases, and almost every other aspect of your cloud infrastructure.

NetApp, BlueXP: For storage and data management, NetApp has some of the most popular solutions in the marketplace. With over a dozen Azure-benefit eligible solutions, NetApp is empowering customers to achieve seamless storage, backup, and replication data management, mobility, analysis, and control, and ransomware protection for their customer’s business-critical operations. The NetApp solutions are available via trial to help you build, protect, and govern your hybrid multi-cloud data estate.

Get started with marketplace

As technology needs expand and evolve, Microsoft is bringing partner solutions to you alongside our own services to support organizational change. The marketplace helps you increase efficiency, buy with confidence, and spend smarter, making it easier for businesses large and small to access the solutions they require to thrive and grow.

• Learn more about the Microsoft commercial marketplace.
• Watch the Microsoft Ignite 2023 session.
• Start browsing solutions in Azure Marketplace and AppSource.

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¹Data from Microsoft internal marketplace data analytics team.