Sharing the value of marketplace with your customers: Reflections from Microsoft Ignite

Cloud marketplaces are the future of B2B commerce, making it easier for organizations to get the solutions they need. At Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago, the Microsoft commercial marketplace team shared with customers how to unlock the value of the marketplace in the era of AI and updates on the latest marketplace capabilities that help them spend smarter and move faster. Here’s a recap of the customer breakout session, “More than a storefront: unlocking value through the marketplace,” now available on the Ignite website and YouTube, to help you share with your customers why they should purchase your solution through the marketplace.

Why cloud marketplaces now?

Cloud marketplaces are growing at an unprecedented rate as more organizations than ever are reliant on the cloud. SaaS spending is expected to reach $232B¹, which is coupled with the increasing investment in AI. McKinsey estimates that 67% of organizations will invest more in AI over the next three years². It’s critical that organizations have a seamless and centralized way to procure and manage these solutions so they can scale and achieve meaningful business value. Yet far too many investments are suboptimized. Zylo reported that license waste was the top challenge for IT professionals³.

The Microsoft commercial marketplace is one catalog of partner solutions published by software companies and vetted by Microsoft. It’s discoverable through our storefronts (Azure Marketplace and AppSource), within our products like Teams and Azure Portal, and through our group of 35K+ Microsoft sellers worldwide. At the core, the marketplace helps customers simplify B2B commerce by streamlining their entire procurement process. It also enables them to buy how they want to buy – whether that’s directly online, through their preferred channel partner, or with their Microsoft account team. With 95% of the Fortune 500 running on Azure⁴, many of these organizations already use the marketplace. But it’s not just the enterprise that’s finding value. We see customers of every size and from every industry finding success.

What’s new in the marketplace?

The marketplace helps customers buy with confidence by trying solutions before they buy and knowing solutions are pre-configured to seamlessly deploy and run on Microsoft technology. It helps them increase efficiency by simplifying their vendor onboarding and having partner solutions billed directly to their Azure invoice. It also helps them spend smarter by maximizing cloud investments because the marketplace counts 100% of Azure benefit eligible purchases towards a customer’s consumption commitment.

Here are three new features to look for in the marketplace:

1. Multiparty private offer (MPO) expansion- MPO is now available in the US, UK, and Canada. This allows customers to bring their preferred channel partner to the marketplace to procure solutions on their behalf. This capability will expand soon to customers in additional geographies.

2. Professional services- Customers can now transact professional services alongside software solutions in the US, UK, and Canada. Professional services could be vendor assistance with implementation, employee training, or consulting support. Now, these purchases can be included in a customer’s single Azure invoice, further simplifying invoicing.

3. Flexible billing- Soon the marketplace will support flexible billing, or the ability to align charges with a budget cycle or consumption needs. This helps to ensure uninterrupted invoicing cycles with adaptable contract terms or automatic transitions. Look for this capability in early 2025.

The power of marketplace for AI transformation

Microsoft is the number one provider of AI services in the world, and the marketplace is part of how we extend AI innovation by connecting customers to the solutions they need. AI solutions are the most purchased category by net new customers⁴. We’ve seen a 163% increase in AI offers listed by our software partners and a 7X increase in customers visiting AI and machine learning offer pages on our storefronts⁴. This has translated to a 387% increase in customers purchasing AI offers⁴. This momentum is driven by the benefits customers get by going through the marketplace, including free trials and proof-of-concept options to ensure that solutions align with their needs before committing. Customers also save time by deploying directly from Azure in a secure environment.

With the marketplace, customers can get cutting edge AI technologies that help them build with generative AI and models-as-a-service. They can also extend copilot capabilities through connectors and agents or build their own copilots. In addition to Microsoft’s own AI tools for developers, organizations can find a breadth of offerings from leading AI companies like Aisera, Cohere, LangChain, and Pinecone. There are also many SaaS applications powered by AI that are helping customers experience AI transformation in any number of scenarios from marketing and human resources to operations and supply chain. To see how a customer would leverage the marketplace to build a custom copilot for business users at a manufacturing company, check out this demo  from the Ignite stage.

AI has also been built into the marketplace to improve the customer experience. Our new AI-powered solution discovery is now available in Azure Portal, helping customers intuitively find solutions with natural language. The search result not only returns solutions but also suggests relevant Microsoft technical documentation to help customers make informed decisions.  

Customer success story

We love showcasing how our customers are finding success through the marketplace. TP (Teleperformance) is a multinational company which offers business services for organizations in 100 countries around the world. Watch the video to see how TP has simplified their cloud portfolio management, unlocked discounts on their Azure infrastructure, and increased time-to-market by streamlining procurement processes. The Ignite session includes an interview with Jatin Suri, Global SVP, Cloud Center of Excellence, who goes into more detail about why the marketplace is key to TP’s procurement strategy.

Resources for your customers

Learn more: Azure.com/Marketplace

Download the eBook: aka.ms/MarketplaceQuickGuide

Talk to experts: aka.ms/MarketplaceCustomerOfficeHours

Check out the video collection: aka.ms/MPCustomerVideos

Get documentation: aka.ms/MarketplaceCustomerDocs

^{1 Custify, The Future of SaaS: Top Trends and Predictions in 2024 and Beyond, July 12, 2024.} 

^{2 McKinsey Global Survey, The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value, May 30, 2024.}

^{3 Zylo, Unchecked SaaS Sprawl Leads to an Average of $18M in License Waste Annually}

^{4 Microsoft internal data}