At Build 2018, we announced the public preview of Private Offers on Azure Marketplace for single virtual machine offers, enabling publishers to create SKUs that are only visible to targeted customers. Azure Marketplace publishers are now able to create these private offers via the Cloud Partner Portal.
Scenarios
Private offers unlock the ability for publishers to create exclusive offers for their closest customers and offer customized software and terms to them. These customized terms enable publishers to light up a variety of scenarios.
- Private Offers can provide specialized pricing such as discounts, long term pricing, and bulk software deals to targeted customers.
- Publishers can broaden the audience for the private offers as they make updates, thereby allowing them to run limited BETA releases. These releases can then be made public later with a few mouse-clicks.
- Special terms and offers can be entered into these offers enabling publishers to offer software with special agreements which must be agreed to while deploying software.
Creating Private Offers and SKUs
For existing offers, publishers can easily create new private variations only visible to and purchasable by the targeted customers by creating new SKUs and marking them as private. Private SKUs must use a new SKU Id, however they may reuse the images already published for a public SKU. This allows publishers to create multiple private SKUs for a public SKU without having to submit multiple images. Any updates to the offer can be made by updating one image and the images across all the public and private SKUs will be updated seamlessly.
Such offers will have both public SKUs and one or more private SKUs only visible to targeted customers. Depending upon the SKU Id referred during the deployment, the disk is deployed and the right prices are charged to the customers. Publishers also have the ability to alter the terms and description shown for these items during deployment.
For new private offers or SKUs which are only available privately, publishers can go about creating their offers as they would today and additionally marking the SKUs as private. The offers that only have private SKUs will not have a publicly visible version. These SKUs will not be visible on AzureMarketplace.com or the Azure portal.
At launch, we are giving publishers the ability to target customers using Subscription Ids. Publishers may enter individual subscription Ids or upload a CSV of subscription Ids which they would like to have access to the private offers. We plan to add more options around targeting customers including using tenant Ids and management groups in the future.
Deploying Private Offers
The experience of deploying private offers for the end customers remains the same as any other public offer. Upon viewing the catalogue on the Azure portal, customers will be prompted that they have private offers available to them:
Private Offers will also appear in search results and be deployable via command line and ARM Templates like any other offers. Just look out for the “Private” badge. To learn more about the new capabilities available to our partners, please visit our documentation page. If you would like to begin selling on Azure Marketplace and take advantage of these new capabilities, you can start on the Azure Marketplace webpage.
Feedback
We are excited to be making these new capabilities available to our partners and as always, we appreciate every bit of feedback. Feel free to use the smile/frown button on the Cloud Partner Portal to send across feedback about this feature (or anything else).